LANDAU, EDMUND

LANDAU, EDMUND (1877–1938), German mathematician. The son of leopold landau , Edmund Landau was educated in Berlin, succeeding H. Minkowski as professor of mathematics at Goettingen in 1909. He was elected to full membership of the academies of Berlin, Goettingen, Halle, Leningrad, and Rome. The coming of the Nazi regime forced him to resign his chair in 1933. Landau was a productive mathematician. Apart from important work on Dirichlet series and the theory of functions, his main interest was in number theory.   He presented for the first time a systematic account of the analytic theory in the Handbuch der Lehre von der Verteilung der Primzahlen (2 vols., 1909, 19532). From 1927 to 1928 when he was visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he played an important role in the development of the Institute of Mathematics. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G.H. Hardy and H. Heilbronn, in: Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 13 (1938), 302–10; J.C. Poggendorff, Biographisch-literarisches Handwoerterbuch, 7 pt. 3 (1959), 10. (Barry Spain)