Paul Bernays

Paul Isaac Bernays (/bɜːrˈneɪz/ bur-NAYZ; Swiss Standard German: [bɛrˈnaɪs]; 17 October 1888 – 18 September 1977) was a Swiss mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical logic, axiomatic set theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He was an assistant and close collaborator of David Hilbert. Bernays was born into a distinguished German-Jewish family of scholars and businessmen. His great-grandfather, Isaac ben Jacob Bernays, served as chief rabbi of Hamburg from 1821 to 1849. Bernays spent his childhood in Berlin, and attended the Köllnische Gymnasium, 1895–1907. At the University of Berlin, he studied mathematics under Issai Schur, Edmund Landau, Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, and Friedrich Schottky; philosophy under Alois Riehl, Carl Stumpf and Ernst Cassirer; and physics under Max Planck. At the University of Göttingen, he studied mathematics under David Hilbert, Edmund Landau, Hermann Weyl, and Felix Klein; physics under Woldemar Voigt and Max Born; and philosophy under Leonard Nelson. In 1912, the University of Göttingen awarded him a Ph.D. in mathematics for a thesis, supervised by Landau, on the analytic number theory of binary quadratic forms. That same year, the University of Zurich awarded him habilitation for a thesis on complex analysis and Picard's theorem. The examiner was Ernst Zermelo.