Hans-Joachim Bremermann

Who was Hans-Joachim Bremermann?

Hans-Joachim Bremermann was a German-American mathematician and biophysicist. He worked on computer science and evolution, introducing new ideas of how mating generates new gene combinations. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.

Bremermann was born in Bremen, Germany of parents Bernard Bremermann and Berta Wicke. He held chairs at the University of California, Berkeley in both mathematics and biophysics, being promoted to full professor in 1966.

Bremermann's doctoral studies were undertaken at the University of Münster, with his Staatsexamen in mathematics and physics completed in 1951. In the same year his doctoral dissertation Die Charakterisierung von Regularitätsgebieten durch pseudokonvexe Funktionen and was to become a specialist in complex analysis. This was a special case of the Levi problem. He came to the United States in 1952 to a research associate position at Stanford University. In 1953, he was appointed a research fellow at Harvard University.

On 16 May 1954 Bremermann married Maria Isabel Lopez Perez-Ojed, a scholar of romance language and literature.