Moritz Abraham Stern

Moritz Abraham Stern (1807 to 1894) was a German mathematician who in 1858 became full professor at Göttingen University, succeeding Carl Friedrich Gauss. He was the first Jewish full professor at a German university to reach that position without changing his religion, since Carl Gustav Jacobi, three decades earlier, came from a family that had converted long before. At Göttingen he taught Bernhard Riemann and helped Gotthold Eisenstein toward a proof of the quadratic reciprocity theorem. His own interests included primes that cannot be written as the sum of a prime and twice a square, now called Stern primes. He is known for Stern diatomic series, which counts the ways to write a number as a sum of powers of two with no power used more than twice, and for the Stern-Brocot tree, which he described in 1858 and which Achille Brocot found independently in 1861.