Shmuel Agmon

Shmuel Agmon was born in 1922 in Tel Aviv

Agmon was born in Tel Aviv in 1922 to the writer Nathan Agmon and the dentist Chaya Agmon. The family lived in Nazareth, where his mother worked, and then moved to Jerusalem. He attended the Rehavia Gymnasium, was a youth chess champion and belonged to the HaMahanot HaOlim youth movement.

In 1940 he began studying mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He left his studies in 1942 to join the British Army and returned after his discharge in 1946. He went to France in 1947 and earned a PhD from the Sorbonne in 1949 under Szolem Mandelbrojt.

After working at Rice University from 1950 to 1952, he joined the Hebrew University faculty in 1952 and became a full professor in 1959. With Louis Nirenberg and Avron Douglis he wrote key works on elliptic boundary value problems. He later studied the Schrödinger equation, and a metric he defined became known as the Agmon metric.

In 1947 he married Galia Yardeni, and they had three sons. After her death in 1968 he married Nechama de-Shalit in 1972. He retired in 1990, published his final paper in 2011 and died in 2025.