Linda Keen

Lipman Bers (1914–1993) was a Latvian-born US mathematician who worked in a number of fields, especially complex analysis, minimal surfaces, and partial differential equations. This volume was created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is very well done and contains about 1/3 biographical materials and 2/3 survey papers of his work, with just a tiny amount of new results.

The main biographical item is a memoir that Bers worked on until the end of the life, though by then it had only reached about the year 1940 when he emigrated to the United States. Bers was a socialist and a Jew living in middle Europe, and judging by this memoir he spent most of his time dodging the police and the Nazis. He received his PhD in 1938, so the mathematical content of this portion is fairly small. The memoir is supplemented by some notes by his children with further details of their family life. There is also a lengthy obituary and a series of appreciations by other mathematicians. There are a large number of family and professional photographs bound in the center of the book.