Lipman Bers was a Latvian-American mathematician, born in Riga, who created the theory of pseudoanalytic functions and worked on Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups.
19 Facts About Lipman Bers
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Lipman Bers was known for his work in human rights activism.
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In Riga, his mother was the principal of a Jewish elementary school, and his father became the principal of a Jewish high school, both of which Lipman Bers attended, with an interlude in Berlin while his mother, by then separated from his father, attended the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.
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Lipman Bers continued his studies at the University of Riga, where he became active in socialist politics, including giving political speeches and working for an underground newspaper.
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Lipman Bers had begun his studies in Prague with Rudolf Carnap, but when Carnap moved to the US he switched to Charles Loewner, who would eventually become his thesis advisor.
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The Lipman Bers family rejoined Lipman Bers' mother, who had by then moved to New York City and become a psychoanalyst, married to thespian Beno Tumarin.
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Lipman Bers spent World War II teaching mathematics as a research associate at Brown University, where he was joined by Loewner.
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Lipman Bers's move to NYU coincided with a move of his family to New Rochelle, New York, where he joined a small community of emigre mathematicians.
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Lipman Bers was a Vice-President and a President of the American Mathematical Society, chaired the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the United States National Research Council from 1969 to 1971, chaired the US National Committee on Mathematics from 1977 to 1981, and chaired the Mathematics Section of the National Academy of Sciences from 1967 to 1970.
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Late in his life, Lipman Bers suffered from Parkinson's disease and strokes.
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Lipman Bers proved an extension of Riemann's theorem on removable singularities, showing that any isolated singularity of a pencil of minimal surfaces can be removed; he spoke on this result at the 1950 International Congress of Mathematicians and published it in Annals of Mathematics.
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Later, beginning with his visit to the Institute for Advanced Study, Lipman Bers "began a ten-year odyssey that took him from pseudoanalytic functions and elliptic equations to quasiconformal mappings, Teichmuller theory, and Kleinian groups".
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Lipman Bers applied Eichler cohomology, previously developed for applications in number theory and the theory of Lie groups, to Kleinian groups.
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Lipman Bers proved the Bers area inequality, an area bound for hyperbolic surfaces that became a two-dimensional precursor to William Thurston's work on geometrization of 3-manifolds and 3-manifold volume, and in this period Bers himself studied the continuous symmetries of hyperbolic 3-space.
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Lipman Bers founded the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences, and beginning in the 1970s worked to allow the emigration of dissident Soviet mathematicians including Yuri Shikhanovich, Leonid Plyushch, Valentin Turchin, and David and Gregory Chudnovsky.
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In 1961, Lipman Bers was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1965 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Lipman Bers joined the National Academy of Sciences in 1964.
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Lipman Bers was a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
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Lipman Bers received the AMS Leroy P Steele Prize for mathematical exposition in 1975 for his paper "Uniformization, moduli, and Kleinian groups".