Erhard Schmidt

Erhard Schmidt, who lived from 1876 to 1959, was a Baltic German mathematician born in Tartu, then called Dorpat, in the Governorate of Livonia, a place now in Estonia. He took his doctorate at the University of Gottingen in 1905 under David Hilbert with a dissertation on the expansion of arbitrary functions in systems of prescribed functions, a work on integral equations. Together with Hilbert he made important contributions to functional analysis, and Ernst Zermelo credited conversations with Schmidt for the idea and method of his 1904 proof of the well-ordering theorem from the axiom of choice. After the Second World War, in 1948, Schmidt founded the journal Mathematische Nachrichten and became its first editor-in-chief. During the Nazi years he held positions of authority at the University of Berlin, a period in which he was a conservative nationalist whose conduct is described critically in the article cited here.