Erhard Schmidt

For the World War I Imperial German Admiral, see Erhard Schmidt (admiral).

Erhard Schmidt
Erhard Schmidt (courtesy MFO)
Born	13 January 1876(1876-01-13) Tartu, Governorate of Livonia (now Estonia)
Died	6 December 1959(1959-12-06) (aged 83) Berlin
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	Georg-August University of Göttingen
Doctoral advisor	David Hilbert
Doctoral students	Salomon Bochner Richard Brauer Heinz Hopf Martin Kneser

Erhard Schmidt (13 January 1876 – 6 December 1959) was a German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century. He was born in Tartu, Governorate of Livonia (now Estonia). His advisor was David Hilbert and he was awarded his doctorate from Georg-August University of Göttingen in 1905. His doctoral dissertation was entitled Entwickelung willkürlicher Funktionen nach Systemen vorgeschriebener and was a work on integral equations.

Together with David Hilbert he made important contributions to functional analysis.

During World War II Schmidt held positions of authority at the University of Berlin and had to carry out various Nazi resolutions against the Jews—a job that he apparently did not do well, since he was criticized at one point for not understanding the "Jewish question." At the celebration of Schmidt's 75th birthday in 1951 a prominent Jewish mathematician, Hans Freudenthal, who had survived the Nazi years, spoke of the difficulties that Schmidt faced during that period without criticism.

See also

• Gram–Schmidt process
• Hilbert–Schmidt operator
• Schmidt decomposition
• Hilbert–Schmidt integral operator

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Erhard Schmidt", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Schmidt.html .
• Erhard Schmidt at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.