JEWS IN MATHEMATICS
Eric Temple Bell's
classic Men of Mathematics describes the lives and
work of the great pre-twentieth century
mathematicians. The thirty-four biographical portraits
contained in this book include those of four mathematicians
of Jewish descent: Carl G. J. Jacobi, James Joseph
Sylvester, Leopold Kronecker, and Georg Cantor*. In
the twentieth century, the Jewish contribution to
mathematics increased dramatically with the work of
individuals such as Jacques Hadamard, Hermann Minkowski,
Felix Hausdorff, Emmy Noether (widely considered to have
been the greatest woman in the history of mathematics),
John von Neumann, Vito Volterra, Norbert Wiener, Oscar
Zariski, Emil Post, Alfred Tarski, Paul Erdös, Israel
Gelfand, André Weil, Alexander Grothendieck*,
and hundreds of others. Grothendieck and von Neumann
are generally ranked (along with German mathematician David
Hilbert) among the three greatest mathematicians of the
twentieth century.
Jews have made major contributions to virtually all branches
of mathematics and were especially prominent among the
founders and pioneers of a number of these, including set
theory (Georg Cantor*, Abraham Fraenkel, Felix
Hausdorff, and Paul Cohen), modern algebraic geometry
(Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques, Oscar Zariski, André Weil, and Alexander
Grothendieck*), category theory (Samuel
Eilenberg), functional analysis (Giulio
Ascoli, Salvatore Pincherle, Jacques Hadamard, Vito
Volterra, Frigyes Riesz, Hans Hahn, Eduard Helly, Norbert
Wiener, and John von Neumann),
theory of operator algebras (John von Neumann, Israel
Gelfand, Mark Naimark, I. E. Segal, and Irving Kaplansky),
integral equations theory (Vito Volterra), and stochastic
process theory (Albert Einstein, Paul Lévy, Norbert
Wiener, Wolfgang Doeblin, William Feller*, Alexander
Khinchine, and Joseph Doob).
A number of the most powerful mathematical methods employed
in scientific, engineering, and/or economic applications
were invented, or co-invented, by Jews, including the finite
element method (Boris Galerkin and Richard Courant),
the Monte Carlo method (Stanislaw Ulam and John von
Neumann), linear programming
(Leonid Kantorovich, George B. Dantzig, and John von
Neumann), and game theory (John von Neumann).
Work in the latter two fields has garnered more than a dozen
Nobel Prizes in economics.
The relative magnitude of the Jewish contribution to
twentieth and twenty-first century mathematics can be
estimated from the Jewish representation among the
recipients of several of the most prestigious
awards in
the field, which are listed below.
Another indicator is the greater than 40% Jewish makeup of
the combined membership of the divisions of mathematics and
applied mathematical sciences of the US National Academy of
Sciences.