Friedrich Schur

Friedrich Heinrich Schur (1856 to 1932) was a German mathematician who studied geometry. Born on an estate in the Province of Posen to a family of Jewish origin that had converted to Protestantism, he studied at Breslau and then at Berlin, where he took his doctorate in 1879 under Ernst Kummer with a thesis on line complexes of the first and second degree. He assisted Felix Klein in Leipzig and then held chairs at Tartu, Aachen, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg and Breslau, serving as rector at Karlsruhe in 1904 and 1905. His research covered differential geometry and transformation groups after Sophus Lie, and he summarized much of it in Grundlagen der Geometrie in 1909, for which he received the Lobachevsky Prize in 1912. He chaired the German Mathematical Society in 1910, and among his students were Theodor Molien and Julius Wellstein.