Charles Loewner

Charles Loewner (1893-1968), known as Karel Lowner in Czech and Karl Lowner in German, was an American mathematician. Born into a Jewish family in Lany, about thirty kilometres from Prague, he received his doctorate from the University of Prague in 1917 under Georg Pick. His best known technique, the Loewner differential equation, grew out of his proof of the first highly nontrivial case of the Bieberbach conjecture, the third coefficient, and was used in Louis de Branges's final solution in 1985. In 1949 he proved Loewner's torus inequality on the systole of metrics on the two-torus. He taught in Berlin and Prague before leaving for the United States, where he taught at Louisville, Brown, Syracuse and finally Stanford. His students include Lipman Bers, Roger Horn, Adriano Garsia and P. M. Pu.