Felix Behrend

Felix Adalbert Behrend was a German mathematician of Jewish descent who lived from 1911 to 1962. He escaped Nazi Germany, worked briefly in England and Czechoslovakia, was deported to Australia as an enemy alien in 1940 and, after his release in 1942, spent the rest of his career at the University of Melbourne. His doctorate at Humboldt University in 1933, on abundant numbers, was supervised by Erhard Schmidt. His research covered combinatorics, number theory and later topology. Behrend's theorem on the logarithmic density of sets of integers in which no member divides another, his construction of large Salem-Spencer sets with no three-term arithmetic progression, and the Behrend sequences named after him are the results he is best known for. A posthumous children's book, Ulysses' Father, appeared in 1962.