Hermann Schwarz

Schwarz was born in Hermsdorf, Silesia (now Sobieszów, Poland). In 1868 he married Marie Kummer, who was the daughter to the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer and Ottilie née Mendelssohn (a daughter of Nathan Mendelssohn and granddaughter of Moses Mendelssohn). Schwarz and Kummer had six children, including his daughter Emily Schwarz. Schwarz originally studied chemistry in Berlin but Ernst Eduard Kummer and Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass persuaded him to change to mathematics. He received his Ph.D. from the Universität Berlin in 1864 and was advised by Kummer and Weierstrass. Between 1867 and 1869 he worked at the University of Halle, then at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic. From 1875 he worked at Göttingen University, dealing with the subjects of complex analysis, differential geometry and the calculus of variations. He died in Berlin on 30 November 1921. Schwarz's works include Bestimmung einer speziellen Minimalfläche, which was crowned by the Berlin Academy in 1867 and printed in 1871, and Gesammelte mathematische Abhandlungen (1890).