Hans-Joachim Bremermann

Hans-Joachim Bremermann (1926 to 1996) was a German-born American mathematician and biophysicist. Born in Bremen, he studied at the University of Münster, then a leading centre for complex analysis, and his 1951 doctoral dissertation solved a special case of the Levi problem on pseudoconvex domains. In 1954 he proved the general theorem that pseudoconvex domains are domains of holomorphy in n complex variables, extending the result Kiyoshi Oka had obtained for two variables. After research posts at Stanford, Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Study he joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1959, where he held chairs in both mathematics and biophysics. With L. Durand he gave an approach to representing distributions by boundary values of analytic functions that suited the needs of physics, and from the 1960s his interests turned to the theory of computation, genetic search algorithms, pattern recognition and mathematical biology, including models of parasites, disease and AIDS. He became an American citizen in 1965 and retired from Berkeley in 1991.