Bers was born in Riga, then under the rule of the Russian Czars, and spent several years as a child in
Saint Petersburg; his family returned to Riga in approximately 1919, by which time it was part of independent
Latvia. In Riga, his mother was the principal of a Jewish elementary school, and his father became the principal of a Jewish high school, both of which Bers attended, with an interlude in
Berlin while his mother, by then separated from his father, attended the
Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. After high school, Bers studied at the
University of Zurich for a year, but had to return to Riga again because of the difficulty of transferring money from Latvia in the international financial crisis of the time. He continued his studies at the
University of Riga, where he became active in socialist politics, including giving political speeches and working for an underground newspaper. In the aftermath of the Latvian coup in 1934 by right-wing leader
Kārlis Ulmanis, Bers was targeted for arrest but fled the country, first to Estonia and then to Czechoslovakia. Bers received his Ph.D. in 1938 from the
University of Prague. He had begun his studies in Prague with
Rudolf Carnap, but when Carnap moved to the US he switched to
Charles Loewner, who would eventually become his thesis advisor. In Prague, he lived with an aunt, and married his wife Mary (née Kagan) whom he had met in elementary school and who had followed him from Riga. Having applied for postdoctoral studies in Paris, he was given a visa to go to France soon after the
Munich Agreement, by which Nazi Germany annexed the
Sudetenland. He and his wife Mary had a daughter in Paris. They were unable to obtain a visa there to emigrate to the US, as the Latvian quota had filled, so they escaped to the south of France ten days before the fall of Paris, and eventually obtained an emergency US visa in Marseilles, one of a group of 10,000 visas set aside for political refugees by
Eleanor Roosevelt. The Bers family rejoined Bers' mother, who had by then moved to
New York City and become a psychoanalyst, married to thespian Beno Tumarin. At this time, Bers worked for the
YIVO Yiddish research agency. He was a visiting scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study in 1949–51. He was a Vice-President (1963–65) and a President (1975–77) of the
American Mathematical Society, chaired the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the
United States National Research Council from 1969 to 1971, chaired the U.S. National Committee on Mathematics from 1977 to 1981, and chaired the Mathematics Section of the
National Academy of Sciences from 1967 to 1970. Late in his life, Bers suffered from
Parkinson's disease and
strokes. He died on October 29, 1993. ==Mathematical research==