Lipman Bers

Lipman Bers (1914 to 1993) was a Latvian-American mathematician, born in Riga, who created the theory of pseudoanalytic functions and worked on Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups. He fled Latvia after the 1934 coup, studied at the University of Prague under Charles Loewner, who became his thesis advisor, and received his Ph.D. in 1938. After escaping through France to the United States he taught at Brown, Syracuse, New York University and from 1964 Columbia, where he became Davies Professor of Mathematics. With Lars Ahlfors he solved the moduli problem of parameterizing Teichmüller space, and he proved the Bers area inequality. He served as President of the American Mathematical Society from 1975 to 1977 and was also known for his human rights activism.