Person: Lewy, Hans

Hans Lewy was a Polish-born American mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and on functions of several complex variables.

During the years when Lewy held a position at Göttingen he was awarded two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, the first allowing him to spend session 1929-30 at the University of Rome and second allowing him to spend session 1930-1931 at the University of Paris.
The revolutionary character of these works is reflected in the fact that J Hadamard, a world authority at that time, devoted a special appendix to Lewy's theory in his newly published book on the Cauchy Problem (1932).
On 30 January 1933 Hitler came to power and Lewy realised that he could not remain in Germany and that he had to emigrate.
Lewy retired in 1972 but continued to produce deep mathematics.
Another paper of major importance which Lewy published in 1951 was On minimal surfaces with partially free boundary which examines the continuation of minimal surfaces across analytic boundary arcs.
This work led Lewy to two later papers on the theory of functions of several complex variables for which he received the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1979.
Lewy received many honours for his mathematical contributions.
Lewy had wide-ranging talents and interests both within and outside mathematics.

Born 20 October 1904, Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland). Died 23 August 1988, Berkeley, California, USA.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Poland, Prize Wolf

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

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