Alfred Pringsheim

Alfred Pringsheim (2 September 1850 – 25 June 1941) was a German mathematician and patron of the arts. He was born in Ohlau, Prussian Silesia (now Oława, Poland) and died in Zürich, Switzerland. Pringsheim came from an extremely wealthy Silesian merchant family with Jewish roots. He was the first-born child and only son of the Upper Silesian railway entrepreneur and coal mine owner Rudolf Pringsheim (1821–1901) and his wife Paula, née Deutschmann (1827–1909). He had a younger sister, Martha. Pringsheim attended the Maria Magdalena Gymnasium in Breslau, where he excelled in music and mathematics. Starting in 1868 he studied mathematics and physics in Berlin and at the Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg. In 1872 he was awarded a doctorate in mathematics, studying under Leo Königsberger. In 1875, he moved from Berlin, where his parents lived, to Munich to earn his habilitation. Two years later he became a lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In 1886 Pringsheim was appointed associate professor of mathematics there, and in 1901 full professor. He retired as emeritus professor in 1922. He was elected a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1898, a position he held until 1938, and was a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. He was also awarded membership in the Leopoldina, Germany's oldest academy of natural sciences. Pringsheim considered himself to be a German citizen who no longer followed the "Mosaic belief" (meaning conservative or orthodox Judaism). He repeatedly declined to have himself baptized. In 1878 Pringsheim married the Berlin actress Gertrude Hedwig Anna Dohm (1855–1942), whose mother was the Berlin advocate of women's rights Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919). They had five children: Erik (born 1879), Peter (born 1881), Heinz (born 1882) and twins born in 1883, Klaus and Katharina, known as Katia. His first-born son, Erik, was exiled to Argentina because of his dissolute life and gambling debts and died there at an early age.