Person: Leimanis, Eizens

Eižens Leimanis was a Latvian mathematician who worked on the three-body problem.

Leimanis was brought up in Latvia near the end of a long period of Russian domination.
It was into this new University of Latvia that Leimanis entered in 1924.
After the award of his Master's Degree Leimanis was appointed as an assistant in the Department of Descriptive Geometry at the University, but he supplemented his income by teaching mathematics at the Riga School of Commerce during session 1930-31.
Keen to broaden his education, Leimanis set off in 1931 to visit various places in Europe with very different mathematical specialities.
During this extremely difficult period Leimanis continued to teach and undertake research at the University of Latvia.
At this time Leimanis was forced to go to Danzig as a refugee.
For a while Leimanis taught at the Baltics University in Hamburg but in 1949 he emigrated to Canada, becoming professor at Columbia University in Vancouver.
In 1958 Leimanis published Some recent advances in the dynamics of rigid bodies and celestial mechanics.
Leimanis continued to publish and, when he was approaching 80, the paper On integration of the differential equation of central motion appeared.

Born 10 April 1905, Vecbaizas (near Valmiera), Latvia. Died 4 December 1992, Vancouver, Canada.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Latvia

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive