Hans Lewy

Hans Lewy was an American mathematician known for his work on partial differential equations and on the theory of functions of several complex variables, born to a Jewish family in Breslau, Silesia, on October 20, 1904. He began his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1922, studying mathematics and physics under teachers including Max Born, Richard Courant, James Franck, David Hilbert, Edmund Landau and Emmy Noether, and earned his doctorate in 1926. He and Kurt Otto Friedrichs became assistants to Courant, and the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition originated in 1928. With a Rockefeller Fellowship he studied in Rome and Paris, and with the help of Hadamard he found a two-year position at Brown University in America. He later taught at Berkeley until 1972 and then became an Ordway Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1964, received a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1986 and died on 23 August 1988.