Hermann Schwarz

Who was Hermann Schwarz?

Karl Hermann Amandus Schwarz was a German mathematician, known for his work in complex analysis. He was born in Hermsdorf, Silesia. He was married to Marie Kummer, a daughter of the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer and his wife Ottilie née Mendelssohn. They had six children.

Schwarz originally studied chemistry in Berlin but Kummer and Weierstraß persuaded him to change to mathematics. Between 1867 and 1869 he worked in Halle, then in Zürich. From 1875 he worked at Göttingen University, dealing with the subjects of function theory, differential geometry and the calculus of variations. His works include Bestimmung einer speziellen Minimalfläche, which was crowned by the Berlin Academy in 1867 and printed in 1871, and Gesammelte mathematische Abhandlungen. In 1892 he became a member of the Berlin Academy of Science and a professor at the University of Berlin, where his students included Lipót Fejér, Paul Koebe and Ernst Zermelo. He died in Berlin.