Bolza

Oskar Bolza

Born: 12 May 1857 in Bergzabern, Rhenish Palatinate (now Germany)
Died: 5 July 1942 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

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Oskar Bolza studied at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1886 from the University of Göttingen. He was taught by Klein and Weierstrass, and he worked on elliptic integrals, elliptic functions and the calculus of variations.

He emigrated to the USA in 1883 and worked at several universities including Chicago. His work Lectures on the Calculus of Variations (1908) became a classic in its field. After the death of his friend Maschke in 1908, Bolza became unhappy in the USA and returned to Germany in 1910. He became interested in religious psychology but returned to mathematics, lecturing at Freiburg from 1929 to 1933 when he retired.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. G A Bliss, Oskar Bolza - In Memoriam, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 50 (1944), 478-489. 
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