Oskar Bolza

Oskar Bolza (1857-1942) was a German mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations. Born in Bad Bergzabern in the Palatinate, he reached mathematics by a long route, studying languages and physics before turning to pure mathematics in 1878, and he took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1886 under Felix Klein. He then worked in the United States, at Johns Hopkins University, Clark University and from 1892 the University of Chicago, before returning to Freiburg in 1910. His 1904 Lectures on the Calculus of Variations became a classic text, and two papers of 1913 and 1914 formulated a variational problem now called the problem of Bolza, later important in control theory. After 1914 he turned for a time to religious psychology and Sanskrit, and he lectured again at Freiburg until his retirement in 1933.