Issai Schur
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Issai Schur (January 10, 1875 in Mogilyov - January 10, 1941 in Tel Aviv) was a mathematician who worked in Germany for most of his life. He studied at Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in 1901, became lecturer in 1903 and, after a stay at Bonn, professor in 1919.
He felt rather German than Jewish, even though he had been born in the Russian Empire in what is now Belarus, and brought up partly in Latvia. For this reason he declined invitations from the United States and Britain in 1934. Nevertheless he was dismissed from his chair in 1935 and, at the instigation of Bieberbach, he had to resign from the Prussian Academy in 1938. Under further humiliations he emigrated to Israel where he died on his 66th birthday.
As a student of Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, he worked on group representations but also in combinatorics and even theoretical physics. An ancillary result was the existence of the Schur decomposition which nowadays he is best known for.
See also: Schur's lemma, Schur multiplier, Schur indicator, Schur index, Schur complement, Schur's theorem.