Issai Schur

Issai Schur (10 January 1875 – 10 January 1941) was a Russian mathematician who worked in Germany for most of his life. He studied at the University of Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in 1901, became lecturer in 1903 and, after a stay at the University of Bonn, professor in 1919. As a student of Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, he worked on group representations (the subject with which he is most closely associated), but also in combinatorics and number theory and even theoretical physics. He is perhaps best known today for his result on the existence of the Schur decomposition and for his work on group representations (Schur's lemma). Schur published under the name of both I. Schur, and J. Schur, the latter especially in Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik. This has led to some confusion. Issai Schur was born into a Jewish family, the son of the businessman Moses Schur and his wife Golde Schur (née Landau). He was born in Mogilev on the Dnieper River in what was then the Russian Empire. Schur used the name Schaia (Isaiah as the epitaph on his grave) rather than Issai up in his middle twenties. Schur's father may have been a wholesale merchant. In 1888, at the age of 13, Schur went to Liepāja (Courland, now in Latvia), where his married sister and his brother lived, 640 km north-west of Mogilev. Kurland was one of the three Baltic governorates of Tsarist Russia, and since the Middle Ages the Baltic Germans were the upper social class. The local Jewish community spoke mostly German and not Yiddish. Schur attended the German-speaking Nicolai Gymnasium in Libau from 1888 to 1894 and reached the top grade in his final examination, and received a gold medal. Here he became fluent in German. In October 1894, Schur attended the University of Berlin, with concentration in mathematics and physics. In 1901, he graduated summa cum laude under Frobenius and Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs with his dissertation On a class of matrices that can be assigned to a given matrix, which contains a general theory of the representation of linear groups.