Issai Schur

Issai Schur (January 10, 1875 in Mogilev – January 10, 1941 in Tel Aviv) was a mathematician who worked in Germany for most of his life. He studied at Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in 1901, became lecturer in 1903 and, after a stay at Bonn, professor in 1919.

He considered himself German rather than Jewish, even though he had been born in the Russian Empire in what is now Belarus, and brought up partly in Latvia. For this reason he declined invitations to leave Germany for the United States and Britain in 1934. Nevertheless he was dismissed from his chair in 1935 and, at the instigation of Ludwig Bieberbach (who had previously sympathised with Schur regarding his treatment at the hands of the Nazis), he was forced to resign from the Prussian Academy in 1938. Schur eventually emigrated to Palestine in 1939, and lived his final years in poverty. He died in Tel Aviv on his 66th birthday.

As a student of Frobenius, he worked on group representations (the subject with which he is most closely associated), but also in combinatorics and number theory and even theoretical physics. He is perhaps best known today for his result on the existence of the Schur decomposition and for his work on group representations (Schur's lemma).

Schur had a number of students, including Richard Brauer, B. H. Neumann, Heinz Prüfer, and Richard Rado. His lectures were very popular with students.[1] He was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR as a foreign corresponding member in 1929.[2]

Schur published under the name of both I. Schur, and J. Schur, the latter especially in Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik. This has led to some confusion.[3]

5 External links

See also

Schur algebra
Schur complement
Schur decomposition
Schur index
Schur indicator
Schur multiplier
Schur orthogonality relations
Schur polynomial
Schur's lemma
Schur test
Schur's inequality
Schur's theorem
Schur-convex function
Lehmer-Schur algorithm
Schur's property for normed spaces.
Jordan–Schur theorem
Schur's lower bound

Notes

^ Biography of Walter Ledermann
^ Schur I. - General info at www.ras.ru
^ Ledermann, W. (1983). "Issai Schur and his school in Berlin". Bull. London Math. Soc. 15 (2): 97–106. doi:10.1112/blms/15.2.97.

Publications

Schur, Issai (1968), Grunsky, Helmut, ed., Vorlesungen über Invariantentheorie, Die Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, 143, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, MR0229674
Schur, Issai (1973), Brauer, Alfred; Rohrbach, Hans, eds., Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-540-05630-0, MR0462891

References

Curtis, Charles W. (2003), Pioneers of Representation Theory: Frobenius, Burnside, Schur, and Brauer, History of Mathematics, Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, ISBN 978-0-8218-2677-5, MR1715145Review
Joseph, Anthony; Melnikov, Anna; Rentschler, Rudolf, eds. (2003), Studies in memory of Issai Schur, Progress in Mathematics, 210, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, ISBN 978-0-8176-4208-2, MR1985184

External links

O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Issai Schur", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
Issai Schur at the Mathematics Genealogy Project