Felix Bernstein (mathematician)

Felix Bernstein (1878 to 1956) was a German mathematician best known for the Schröder-Bernstein theorem, which says that if each of two sets can be matched with part of the other, then the two sets can be matched exactly with each other. Born in Halle into a family of academics, he attended Georg Cantor's set theory seminar while still at school and found his proof of the theorem as a teenager, while correcting the proofs of Cantor's own work. He later did research under David Hilbert and Felix Klein at Göttingen, where a dissertation on set theory earned his doctorate in 1901. Although set theory made his name, most of his career was spent in statistics, actuarial mathematics and mathematical biology, including his 1924 and 1925 papers showing that the human ABO blood groups are inherited through multiple alleles at one locus. He founded the Institute of Mathematical Statistics at Göttingen in 1921, was deprived of his chair after the Nazi seizure of power, taught in the United States, and retired to Europe in 1948. He died in Zürich in 1956.