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, Alfred Tarski, Paul Erdös, Israel Gelfand, André Weil, Alexander Grothendieck*,
and hundreds of others.
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*), modern algebraic geometry
(Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques, Oscar Zariski, André Weil, and Alexander
Grothendieck*), functional analysis (Giulio Ascoli,
Cesare Arzelà, 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, 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 no fewer than a
dozen Nobel Prizes in economics.
The relative magnitude of the Jewish contribution to
mathematics (at least to modern mathematics) can be
estimated from the Jewish representation among the
recipients of the five most prestigious
awards in
the field.1
These are listed below, with the awards
appearing in rough order of importance. Another
indicator is the nearly 50% Jewish makeup of the combined
membership of the divisions of mathematics and applied
mathematical sciences of the US National Academy of
Sciences.