Born in
Częstochowa,
Congress Poland,
Russian Empire, to a German Jewish family, Bergman received his
Ph.D. at University of Berlin in 1921, for a
dissertation on
Fourier analysis. His advisor,
Richard von Mises, had a strong influence on him, lasting for the rest of his career. In 1933, Bergman was forced to leave his post at the Berlin University because he was a
Jew. He fled first to
Russia, where he stayed until 1939, and then to
Paris. In 1939, he emigrated to the
United States, where he would remain for the rest of life. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1952 until his retirement in 1972. He was an
invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in 1962 in
Stockholm (
On meromorphic functions of several complex variables). He died in
Palo Alto, California, aged 82.
Bergman Prize The
Stefan Bergman Prize in mathematics was initiated by Bergman's wife in her will, in memory of her husband's work. The
American Mathematical Society supports the prize and selects the committee of judges. The prize is awarded for: • the theory of the
kernel function and its applications in real and complex analysis; or • function-theoretic methods in the theory of
partial differential equations of
elliptic type with a special attention to Bergman's and related operator methods. == Selected publications ==