Menahem Max Schiffer

Menahem Max Schiffer was born in 1911 in Berlin

Schiffer was born in Berlin on 24 September 1911 to a Jewish family. In 1930 he began studying physics in Berlin, where his teachers included Max von Laue, Erwin Schrödinger and Issai Schur. During his studies he turned to mathematics.

Forced out of German academia by the Nazis, he immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1934. He earned a master's degree at the Hebrew University based on his earlier publications. In 1938 he completed a doctorate under Michael Fekete, introducing the method known as the Schiffer variation.

He worked at the Hebrew University until 1946, then moved to Harvard University. He became a professor at Stanford University in 1952 and chaired its mathematics department from 1954 to 1959. With Paul Garabedian he proved in 1955 a special case of the Bieberbach conjecture.

He wrote 135 publications, including 4 books, among them a 1965 book on general relativity. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1970 and retired from Stanford in 1977. He married Fanya Rabinovich in 1937 and died in California on 11 November 1997.