Menahem Max Schiffer

Menahem Max Schiffer (24 September 1911, Berlin – 11 November 1997) ) was a German-born American mathematician who worked in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics.

Biography
Menachem Max Schiffer studied physics from 1930 at the University of Bonn and then at the Humboldt University of Berlin with Max von Laue, Erwin Schrödinger, Walter Nernst, Erhard Schmidt, Issai Schur and Ludwig Bieberbach. In Berlin he worked closely with Issai Schur. In 1934, after being forced by the Nazis to leave the academic world, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine.

On the basis of his prior mathematical publications, Schiffer received a master's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1938, he received his doctorate under the supervision of Michael Fekete. In his dissertation on Conformal representation and univalent functions he introduced the "Schiffer variation", a method for handling geometric problems in complex analysis.

Schiffer married Fanya Rabinivics Schiffer in 1937. His daughter Dinah S. Singer, is an experimental immunologist.

Academic career
In September 1952, he began to teach at Stanford University, along with George Pólya, Charles Loewner, Stefan Bergman, and Gábor Szegő.

With Paul Garabedian, Schiffer worked on the Bieberbach conjecture with a proof in 1955 of the special case n=4. He was a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 1950 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a plenary speaker at the ICM in 1958 at Edinburgh with plenary address Extremum Problems and Variational Methods in Conformal Mapping. In 1970 he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. He retired from Stanford University as professor emeritus in 1977.

In 1981, Schiffer became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.

Selected publications

 * with Leon Bowden: The role of mathematics in science, Mathematical Association of America 1984
 * with Stefan Bergman: Kernel functions and elliptic differential equations in mathematical physics, Academic Press 1953
 * with Donald Spencer: Functionals of finite Riemann Surfaces, Princeton 1954
 * with Ronald Adler, Maurice Bazin: Introduction to General Relativity, McGraw Hill 1965 xvi+ 451 pp. Illus.