Mathwar/Personlist/Loewner Karl
Karl Loewner
(* May 29th 1893 in Lany, Bohemia, † January 8th 1968 in Stanford, USA)
Life
On 30 January 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany and on 7 April 1933 the Civil Service Law was passed which provided the means of removing Jewish teachers from the universities, and of course also to remove those of Jewish descent from other roles. All civil servants who were not of Aryan descent (having one grandparent of the Jewish religion made someone non-Aryan) were to be retired. Of course this did not affect Loewner in Prague, but as he watched the suffering of his Jewish colleagues in Germany he began to become increasingly uneasy. He did all he could to help the Jewish mathematicians who were dismissed from their posts in Germany.
If the political situation gave him cause for concern, his own life was filled with happiness at this time. He married Elisabeth Alexander in 1934. She came from Breslau and was a trained singer. Loewner took piano lessons so that he could accompany his wife as she practised her singing. In 1936 their daughter Marion was born and they lived happily in Prague, seeing the reality of what was happening in Germany and fearing the inevitable outcome of events there. Preparing for the inevitable after the Germans marched into Austria, Loewner took English lessons so that he would be ready for the day he had to leave his homeland.
Among the students Loewner supervised in Prague was Lipa Bers. Bers said that at first he failed to understand Loewner, since he felt he took little interest in his work. However Bers soon came to understand Loewner's methods which were to give his students as much help and encouragement as he felt they required - and Bers was a talented student who needed comparatively little support.
Before moving on to describe the next stage of Loewner's life we should comment of the mathematics he had produced up to this time. It was mathematics of the highest quality, but Loewner had a policy which meant that he only published results he felt were significant. He only published six papers during the 25 years following the time that he began his research activities. However it is not an exaggeration to describe some of these as masterpieces.