11 Facts About Edmund Landau

Edmund Georg Hermann Landau was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis.

Edmund Landau was born to a Jewish family in Berlin.

Edmund Landau's father was Leopold Landau, a gynecologist, and his mother was Johanna Jacoby.

Edmund Landau taught at the University of Berlin from 1899 to 1909, after which he held a chair at the University of Gottingen.

Edmund Landau married Marianne Ehrlich, the daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Ehrlich, in 1905.

At the 1912 International Congress of Mathematicians Edmund Landau listed four problems in number theory about primes that he said were particularly hard using current mathematical methods.

Edmund Landau negotiated with the university's president, Judah Magnes, regarding a position at the university and the building that was to house the Mathematics Institute.

Magnes suggested that Edmund Landau be appointed Rector of the university, but Einstein and Weizmann supported Selig Brodetsky.

Edmund Landau was disgusted by the dispute and decided to return to Gottingen, remaining there until he was forced out by the Nazi regime after the Machtergreifung in 1933, in a boycott organized by Oswald Teichmuller.

Edmund Landau moved to Berlin in 1934, where he died in early 1938 of natural causes.

In 1903, Edmund Landau gave a much simpler proof than was then known of the prime number theorem and later presented the first systematic treatment of analytic number theory in the Handbuch der Lehre von der Verteilung der Primzahlen.