Richard Courant

Richard Courant was a German-American mathematician who bridged the pure analysis of David Hilbert's Gottingen with the applied, computational mathematics that came to define the twentieth century. Born in Lublinitz in Prussian Silesia, he became Hilbert's assistant at Gottingen and took his doctorate there in 1910, later chairing the mathematics faculty at Gottingen and, briefly, Munster before the Nazi purge of Jewish academics forced him out of Germany in 1933. He joined New York University in 1936 and built a small graduate program there into the research institute that was renamed the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in his honor in 1964. Courant's most consequential technical contribution came in a 1943 paper solving a torsion problem by approximating a continuous domain with a mesh of small triangles and minimizing an energy functional over it, a piecewise-linear, mesh-based approach to solving differential equations that mathematicians and engineers only later named the finite element method; Courant did not coin that name, which appeared in the engineering literature in the 1960s, but the underlying piecewise-triangular approximation is his. With David Hilbert he wrote Methods of Mathematical Physics, still a standard reference more than eighty years later, and with his student Herbert Robbins he wrote the popular introduction What Is Mathematics?, which remains in print.