Ludwig Bieberbach

Ludwig Bieberbach, born near Darmstadt on 4 December 1886 and died on 1 September 1982, was a German mathematician best known for formulating the Bieberbach conjecture in 1916, a necessary condition on the Taylor series of a holomorphic function that maps the open unit disc injectively into the plane; Louis de Branges proved it in 1984. He studied at Heidelberg and under Felix Klein at Goettingen, earning his doctorate in 1910 with a thesis on automorphic functions, and his 1911 habilitation on groups of Euclidean motions helped settle the first part of Hilbert's eighteenth problem, giving a theorem on space groups that bears his name. He held chairs at Basel, Frankfurt and Berlin and worked in complex analysis and dynamics in several complex variables. He was also a leading figure of the National Socialist movement called Deutsche Mathematik, and joined in dismissing Jewish colleagues.