Herbert Busemann

Herbert Busemann was a German-American mathematician specializing in convex and differential geometry, born on 12 May 1905 and died on 3 February 1994. Born in Berlin, he studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the University of Paris and the Sapienza University of Rome, and defended his dissertation at the University of Göttingen in 1931 under Richard Courant. He left Germany in 1933 for Copenhagen, where he worked at the university until 1936, then moved to the United States, became a citizen in 1943 and from 1947 was a professor at the University of Southern California, a distinguished professor from 1964 until his retirement in 1970. He wrote six monographs, supervised more than ten doctoral students and is the author of Busemann's theorem in Euclidean geometry and geometric tomography. He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy and received the Lobachevsky Medal in 1985 for his book The Geometry of Geodesics, the first American mathematician to do so.