Issai Schur

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Issai Schur (January 10, 1875 in Mogilyov – January 10, 1941 in Tel Aviv) was a mathematician who worked in Germany for most of his life. He studied at Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in 1901, became lecturer in 1903 and, after a stay at Bonn, professor in 1919.

He considered himself German rather than Jewish, even though he had been born in the Russian Empire in what is now Belarus, and brought up partly in Latvia. For this reason he declined invitations to leave Germany for the United States and Britain in 1934. Nevertheless he was dismissed from his chair in 1935 and, at the instigation of Bieberbach (who had previously sympathised with Schur regarding his treatment at the hands of the Nazis), he was forced to resign from the Prussian Academy in 1938. Schur eventually emigrated to Palestine in 1939, and had to endure the humiliation of living out his final years in poverty. He died in Tel Aviv on his 66th birthday.

As a student of Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, he worked on group representations (the subject he is most closely associated with), but also in combinatorics and even theoretical physics. He is perhaps best known today for his result on the existence of the Schur decomposition.

Schur had a number of students. Among them, Richard Brauer, B. H. Neumann, Heinz Prüfer, and Richard Rado.

[edit] See also

• Schur decomposition
• Schur's lemma
• Schur multiplier
• Schur indicator
• Schur index
• Schur complement
• Schur's theorem
• Schur polynomial
• Schur test
• Schur-convex function
• Schur's inequality
• Lehmer-Schur algorithm

[edit] External link

• O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Issai Schur". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
• Issai Schur at the Mathematics Genealogy Project