Felix Hausdorff

Felix Hausdorff was a German mathematician, who used the pseudonym Paul Mongré, considered to be one of the founders of modern topology and a significant contributor to set theory, descriptive set theory, measure theory and functional analysis. He was born on November 8, 1868, and his father Louis Hausdorff, a Jewish merchant, moved with his young family to Leipzig in the autumn of 1870. Hausdorff was Jewish, and life became difficult for him and his family after the Kristallnacht of 1938. In 1939 he initiated efforts to emigrate to the United States but was unable to arrange a research fellowship, and on 26 January 1942 he died by suicide, together with his wife and his sister-in-law, rather than comply with German orders to move to a concentration camp in Endenich.