Jews in Mathematics

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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, John von Neumann, Vito Volterra, Norbert Wiener, Oscar Zariski, Alfred Tarski, Paul Erdös, Izrail Gelfand, André Weil, Alexander Grothendieck*, and hundreds of others. As a crude index to the magnitude of this contribution, the Jewish representation among the recipients of the five most prestigious awards in mathematics is documented below (with the awards listed in rough order of importance).¹ Another indicator is the greater than 50% Jewish makeup of the combined membership of the divisions of mathematics and applied mathematical sciences of the US National Academy of Sciences.

NOTES
1. The designation of these five awards as being the most prestigious, and their rough order of importance, is based on information contained in the entry "Mathematical Prizes" on p. 1863 of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics (2nd Edition), by Eric W. Weisstein (Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, FL, 2003). These prizes do not constitute completely satisfactory indices, however. The Fields Medal, known informally as the "Nobel Prize in Mathematics," is awarded only to individuals who are forty years of age or younger. The Wolf Prize is an international, lifetime achievement award, but has been in existence only since 1978. It is awarded by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. The last three prizes appear to be awarded primarily to American mathematicians.
* See footnotes on the Jewish backgrounds of Cantor and Grothendieck in the list of Jewish Mathematicians.