Eduard Helly

Eduard Helly was a mathematician born in Vienna on June 1, 1884, after whom Helly's theorem, Helly families, Helly's selection theorem, the Helly metric and the Helly-Bray theorem were named. He earned his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1907 and continued his studies for another year at the University of Göttingen. He was shot in 1915 while serving in the Austrian army and spent the rest of World War I as a prisoner of the Russians; in a prison camp in Berezovka, Siberia, he organized a mathematical seminar in which Tibor Radó began his interest in pure mathematics. Unable to obtain a paid university position in Vienna, he escaped to America after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, moved to Chicago in 1941, and died there on 28 November 1943.