Israel Gohberg

Israel Gohberg was born in 1928 in Bessarabske

Gohberg was born in 1928 in Bessarabia to Tsudik and Haya Gohberg. His father owned a small print shop and his mother was a midwife. He attended a Hebrew school and later a Romanian school in Orhei, where the mathematician Modest Shumbarsky taught him.

He studied at the Kyrgyz Pedagogical Institute in Bishkek and at Moldova State University in Chișinău. In 1954 he completed his doctorate at Leningrad State University under Mark Krein. He then earned his habilitation at Moscow State University.

Gohberg taught at teachers colleges in Soroca and Bălți before returning to Chișinău. There he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and headed functional analysis at Moldova State University. He tried to move to Israel from 1969 and arrived with his family in 1974.

In Israel he joined Tel Aviv University and also taught at the Weizmann Institute. He held posts in Amsterdam, Calgary and Maryland. He started the IWOTA workshop in 1981 and founded a journal on integral equations and operator theory in 1983.

He received the Rothschild Prize in 1985 and the Humboldt Prize in 1992, along with several honorary doctorates. He was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2009. He died in Ra'anana in 2009.