Ernst G. Straus

Infobox Scientist
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name = Ernst G. Straus


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caption = Ernst Gabor Strauss (1922-1983)
birth_date = February 25, 1922
birth_place = Munich, Germany
death_date = July 12, 1983
death_place = Los Angeles, California, USA
residence = USA
citizenship = American
nationality = American-German
ethnicity = Jewish-German
fields = Mathematician
workplaces =
alma_mater = Hebrew University
Columbia University
doctoral_advisor = F. J. Murray
academic_advisors = Albert Einstein
doctoral_students = Aviezri Fraenkel
Daihachiro Sato
notable_students =
known_for = Erdős–Straus conjecture
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Ernst Gabor Straus (February 25 1922 – July 12 1983) was a German-American mathematician who helped found the theories of Euclidean Ramsey theory and of the arithmetic properties of analytic functions. His extensive list of co-authors includes Albert Einstein and Paul Erdős as well as other notable researchers including Richard Bellman, Béla Bollobás, Sarvadaman Chowla, Ronald Graham, László Lovász, Carl Pomerance, and George Szekeres. It is due to his collaboration with Straus that Einstein has Erdős number 2.

Straus was born in Munich, Germany, February 25 1922, the youngest of five children of a prominent attorney, Eli Straus, and his wife Rahel Straus née Goitein, a medical doctor and feminist. Ernst Gabor Straus became known as a mathematical prodigy from a very young age. Following the death of his father, the family fled the Nazi regime for Palestine in 1933, and Straus was educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Despite never receiving an undergraduate degree, he began graduate studies at Columbia University in New York, earning a Ph.D. in 1948 under the advisement of F. J. Murray. Two years later, he then became the assistant of Albert Einstein. After a three-year stint at the Institute for Advanced Study, Straus took a position at the University of California, Los Angeles, which he kept for the rest of his life. Straus died July 12 1983 of heart failure.

Straus's interests ranged widely over his career, beginning with his early work on relativity with Einstein and continuing with deep work in analytic number theory, extremal graph theory, and combinatorics. One of his best known contributions in popular mathematics is the Erdős–Straus conjecture on Egyptian fractions for numbers of the form 4/"n".

References

*cite journal
author = Cantor, David, Gordon, Basil, Hales, Alfred, and Schacher, Murray
title = Biography — Ernst G. Straus 1922–1983
journal = Pacific Journal of Mathematics
volume = 118
issue = 2
year = 1985
pages = i–xx (Special issue in memory of Ernst G. Straus)

*cite web
author = Grossman, Jerry
title = The Erdős Number Project
url = http://www.oakland.edu/enp/

*cite web
title = Ernst Gabor Straus
publisher = [http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/ The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive]
url = http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Straus.html

*MathGenealogy|id=48496