Leon Lichtenstein

Leon Lichtenstein was a Polish-German mathematician, born in Warsaw on 16 May 1878 into an Ashkenazi Jewish family and died in Zakopane on 21 August 1933, who contributed to differential equations, conformal mapping and potential theory and also published on hydrodynamics and astronomy. His cousin Leo Wiener was the father of the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. He earned a doctorate in engineering at the Technische Hochschule Berlin and a doctorate in mathematics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University with a thesis on differential equations under Hermann Schwarz and Friedrich Schottky, then worked as an engineer for Siemens and Halske from 1902 before turning to academic life in 1910. He was a founder in 1918 and first editor of the journal Mathematische Zeitschrift, moved to a chair at Munster in 1920 and to Leipzig in 1922, where he founded a mathematical school whose students included Ernst Holder, Erich Kahler, Aurel Wintner, Hermann Boerner and Karl Maruhn. In 1933 he left Leipzig for Poland because he would have been dismissed for being Jewish.