Felix Bernstein received his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Göttingen in 1901.
Gallery of Felix Bernstein
Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
Felix Bernstein received his Habilitation in Halle (now Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg) in 1907.
Career
Gallery of Felix Bernstein
Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
Felix Bernstein received his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Göttingen in 1901.
Gallery of Felix Bernstein
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
In 1928 Bernstein spent time at Harvard in the United States as a visiting professor. There he worked on epidemiology, returning to the United States over the next few years to take up other visiting professorships.
Gallery of Felix Bernstein
New York City, New York, United States
From 1934 - 1945, Felix Bernstein worked as a professor of mathematics at Columbia University.
Gallery of Felix Bernstein
Endicott, New York, United States
From 1946 to 1948, Felix Bernstein taught mathematics at Triple Cities College, now part of the State University of New York at Binghamton.
In 1928 Bernstein spent time at Harvard in the United States as a visiting professor. There he worked on epidemiology, returning to the United States over the next few years to take up other visiting professorships.
Felix Bernstein was a German Jewish mathematician, who developed original mathematical and statistical methods for practical biological problems.
Background
Felix Bernstein was born on February 24, 1878, in Halle, Germany, the son of Julius Bernstein, physiologist, who held the Chair of Physiology at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, and was the Director of the Physiological Institute at the University of Halle, and Sophie Levy.
Education
Bernstein studied in Halle with Georg Cantor, a friend of his father, then went to Göttingen to study with Hilbert and Klein. In 1896 he took his Abitur in Halle, then taught mathematics and studied physiology there.
Bernstein received his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Göttingen in 1901 and his Habilitation in Halle (now Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg) in 1907.
After some years in Halle, Bernstein returned to Göttingen and obtained a formal appointment as associate professor for mathematical statistics in 1911.
World War I began in 1914 but Bernstein received medical exemption from military service. However, he still had to contribute to the war effort and he was made the head of the statistical branch of the Office of Rationing in Berlin.
The war ended in 1918 but Bernstein continued to hold government roles becoming Commissioner of Finance in 1921. Also in 1921, he was elected ordinary professor (full professor) at Göttingen and he founded the Institute of Mathematical Statistics there.
In 1928 Bernstein spent time at Harvard in the United States as a visiting professor. There he worked on epidemiology, returning to the United States over the next few years to take up other visiting professorships.
On January 30, 1933, the National Socialist party led by Hitler came to power in Germany. Hitler, as Chancellor of Germany, immediately announced legal action against Germany's Jews. On April 7, 1933, the Nazis introduced a law for the "Restoration of the civil service". This meant that all non-Aryans and Jewish civil servants were dismissed from their positions with the exception of those who either had fought in the Great War or had been in office since August 1914. The exemptions should have meant that Bernstein was unaffected but, like almost all Jewish academics, he was deprived of his chair in 1934.
Bernstein then managed to emigrate with his family to the United States, since the anthropologist Franz Boas had obtained funds to support him for a year at Columbia University and had the agreement of the university that they would offer him a permanent position at the end of the year. But Columbia never made good on this verbal commitment, and for the year 1945 - 1946 he was left without support.
From 1946 to 1948, he taught mathematics at Triple Cities College, now part of the State University of New York at Binghamton.
In 1948, Bernstein retired from teaching in the USA, and returned to Europe. He mainly lived in Rome and Freiburg, occasionally visiting Göttingen, where he became professor emeritus. Felix Bernstein died on December 3, 1956, in Zürich, of cancer.
Felix Bernstein actually belonged to the Protestant church, as his parents had converted to the faith. This did not stop him from being the target of anti-Semites in the 1920's, and he was pushed out of his position at the University by them.
Politics
Felix Bernstein was born into a Jewish family of considerable intellectual as well as political tradition. After World War I, he was one of the founding members of a new left-liberal party (DDP), and he devised the first state loan of the Weimar Republic. This pro-democratic stance would contribute to considerable difficulties he had within the Göttingen faculty during the 1920s. After Hitler's rise to power, he lost his position and emigrated with his family to the US, where he had great difficulties finding an adequate position, not the least because of the truly interdisciplinary nature of his research.
Views
It was in 1895 or 1896, that Felix Bernstein gave the first proof of the equivalence theorem of sets. If each of two sets, A and B, is equivalent to a subset of the other, then A is equivalent to B. This theorem establishes the notion of cardinality and is thus the central theorem in set theory. It bears some similarity to the Eudoxean definition of equal irrationals.
Cantor, who had been working on the equivalence problem, had left for a holiday and Bernstein had volunteered to correct proofs of his book on transcendental numbers. In that interval, the idea for a solution came to Bernstein one morning while shaving. Cantor then worked with the approach for several years before formulating it to his satisfaction. Cantor always gave full credit to Bernstein, who meanwhile had become a student at Pisa. He was persuaded to return to mathematics by two professors there who had heard Cantor expound the equation at a mathematical congress.
Bernstein’s subsequent work in pure and applied mathematics shows great versatility, and includes some of the earliest applications of set theory outside pure mathematics, contributions to isoperimetric problems, convex functions, the Laplace transform, and number theory, as well as set theory itself.
Toward the 1920’s Felix Bernstein became increasingly interested in the mathematical treatment of questions in genetics; he was to contribute decisively to the development of population genetics in the analysis of modes of inheritance. The discovery of human blood groups had made possible an entirely new approach to human genetics. In 1924 Bernstein was able to show that the A, B, and O blood groups are inherited on the basis of a set of triple alleles, and not on the basis of two pairs of genes, as had been thought. He compared a population genetic analysis of the frequencies of the four blood groups — numerous records of racially variant blood-group frequencies had been available since the discovery of this phenomenon by L. and H. Hirschfeld — with the expectations for the blood-group frequencies according to the expanded Hardy-Weinberg formula and found significant and consistent differences. When Bernstein applied the same technique to an expectation based on a triple-allelic system of a single locus, the agreement with observation was excellent.
Personality
Felix Bernstein had a distinguished career in mathematics and showed his versatility by writing on a wide variety of mathematical topics. He retained his interest in art, though, spent many hours in museums and galleries, and entertained his family and friends by constructing statues of modeling clay.
Connections
On September 27, 1913, Felix Bernstein married Edith Johanna Magnus, by whom he had two children.