Charles Loewner

Charles Loewner (29 May 1893 – 8 January 1968) was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German.

Early life and career

Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lány, about 30 km from Prague, where his father Sigmund Löwner was a store owner.

Loewner received his Ph.D. from the University of Prague in 1917 under supervision of Georg Pick.

One of his central mathematical contributions is the proof of the Bieberbach conjecture in the first highly nontrivial case of the third coefficient. The technique he introduced, the Loewner differential equation, has had far-reaching implications in geometric function theory; it was used in the final solution of the Bieberbach conjecture by Louis de Branges in 1985.

Loewner taught mathematics at the University of Berlin and University of Prague before leaving for the United States. "Richard von Mises wrote from Istanbul, in a 1939 letter of

recommendation for Löwner: 'During his activity at the University of Berlin, [Lõwner] was, among all the instructors in Mathematics, the one who had the strongest influence upon the students, stimulated them to independent research, and helped them in his unselfish way. Much of the work involved in the published theses of his pupils is not only due to his influence, but can in a true sense be considered as his work'."

In the United States he taught at University of Louisville, Brown University, Syracuse University and eventually at Stanford University. His students include Lipman Bers, Roger Horn, Adriano Garsia, and P. M. Pu.