Lipman Bers (Latvian: Lipmans Berss; May 22, 1914 – October 29, 1993) was a Latvian-American mathematician, born in Riga, who created the theory of pseudoanalytic functions and worked on Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups. He was also known for his work in human rights activism.
Biography Bers was born in Riga, then under the rule of the Russian Tsars, and spent several years as a child in Saint Petersburg after his hometown fell to invading Germany in 1915; his family returned to Riga in approximately 1919, by which time it was part of independent Latvia. In Riga, his mother was the principal of a Jewish elementary school, and his father became the principal of a Jewish high school, both of which Bers attended, with an interlude in Berlin while his mother, by then separated from his father, attended the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. After high school, Bers studied at the University of Zurich for a year, but had to return to Riga again because of the difficulty of transferring money from Latvia in the international financial crisis of the time. He continued his studies at the University of Riga, where he became active in socialist politics, including giving political speeches and working for an underground newspaper. In the aftermath of the 1934 Latvian coup d'état by right-wing leader Kārlis Ulmanis, Bers was targeted for arrest but fled the country, first to Estonia and then to Czechoslovakia. Bers begun his studies at the University of Prague with Rudolf Carnap, but when Carnap moved to the US he switched to Charles Loewner, who would eventually become his thesis advisor. He received his Ph.D. in 1938. In Prague, he lived with an aunt, and married his wife Mary (née Kagan) whom he had met in elementary school and who had followed him from Riga. Having applied for postdoctoral studies in Paris, he was given a visa to go to France soon after the Munich Agreement, by which Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland. He and his wife Mary had a daughter in Paris. They were unable to obtain a visa there to emigrate to the US, as the Latvian quota had filled, so they escaped to the south of France ten days before the fall of Paris, and eventually obtained an emergency US visa in Marseilles, one of a group of 10,000 visas set aside for political refugees by Eleanor Roosevelt. The Bers family rejoined Bers' mother, who had by then moved to New York City and become a psychoanalyst, married to thespian Boris Tumarin. At this time, Bers worked for the YIVO Yiddish research agency. Bers spent World War II teaching mathematics as a research associate at Brown University, where he was joined by Loewner. After the war, Bers found an assistant professorship at Syracuse University (1945–1951), before moving to New York University (1951–1964) and then Columbia University (1964–1984), where he became the Davies Professor of Mathematics, and where he chaired the mathematics department from 1972 to 1975. His move to NYU coincided with a move of his family to New Rochelle, New York, where he joined a small community of émigré mathematicians. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1949–51. He was a Vice-President (1963–65) and a President (1975–77) of the American Mathematical Society, chaired the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the United States National Research Council from 1969 to 1971, chaired the U.S. National Committee on Mathematics from 1977 to 1981, and chaired the Mathematics Section of the National Academy of Sciences from 1967 to 1970. Late in his life, Bers suffered from Parkinson's disease and strokes. He died on October 29, 1993.
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