Felix Bernstein

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Born: 24 Feb 1878 in Halle, Germany
Died: 3 Dec 1956 in Zurich, Switzerland

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Felix Bernstein studied with Cantor at Halle, then under Hilbert and Klein at Göttingen where he wrote a dissertation on set theory. He taught at Göttingen from 1907 to 1934. In 1921 he became a professor and he founded the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Deprived of his chair in 1934 by Hitler's policies, Bernstein emigrated to the USA teaching at several universities, but he returned to Göttingen in 1948.

Bernstein established his famous theorem on the equivalence of sets while in Cantor's seminar at Halle in 1897. In 1905 Bernstein published an important article on transfinite ordinal numbers.

However, most of Bernstein's activity was in applied mathematics, particularly in statistics, actuarial mathematics and mathematical biology. He worked on convex functions, the Laplace transform, number theory and the mathematical theory of genetics.

In [2] a listing of Bernstein's publications covers four pages and contains one hundred and twenty-eight items.

References (2 books/articles)

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about Bernstein's work on Set theory