Jacob Levitzki

Jacob Levitzki was born in 1904 in Kherson

Levitzki was born in 1904 in Kherson, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were Alexander HaLevi Levitzki and Etil Kotlarov. In 1912 he moved with his family to Ottoman Palestine.

He began high school at the Ezra society school and moved to the Herzliya Gymnasium after the Language War. He then went to Germany and earned a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Göttingen in 1929, supervised by Emmy Noether.

He taught at the University of Kiel and in Jerusalem, and in 1930 went to Yale University with a Sterling fellowship. In 1931 he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He became a lecturer in 1945 and for a time chaired the Institute of Mathematics.

With Charles Hopkins he proved the Hopkins-Levitzki theorem on Artinian and Noetherian rings. In 1950 he and his student Shimshon Amitsur found the standard identities of matrix algebras. For this work both received the Israel Prize in 1953, the first year of the prize.

Levitzki died in 1956. His son Alexander Levitzki founded the Levitzki Prize for Israeli research in algebra, named for his parents.