Herman Müntz

Chaim Herman Müntz (28 August 1884 in Łódź to 17 April 1956 in Sweden) was a German mathematician, now remembered for the Müntz approximation theorem. He was born in Łódź, then in the Russian Empire, to a secular Jewish family that had adopted a German spelling of the surname Minc, and was educated there and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, graduating in 1906. His doctoral dissertation on partial differential equations and the Plateau problem, supervised by H. A. Schwarz, followed in 1910. In the following years he published on projective geometry, iterative methods and approximation theory. He became a German citizen in 1919, later suffered a breakdown and moved back to Poland with his wife, and died in Sweden.