Salomon Bochner

Mathematician, born in Kraków, Poland (formerly, Austria-Hungary). Fleeing from Nazism, he settled at Princeton University (1933). A pioneer in abstract harmonic analysis, his research preceded the theory of distributions. A noted teacher, he chaired the Rice University Mathematics Department (1969–76) and founded an interdisciplinary institute for the history of ideas.

Salomon Bochner (20 August 1899 - 2 May 1982) was a Polish-American mathematician, known for wide-ranging work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry. Bochner was educated at a Berlin gymnasium (secondary) school, and then at the University of Berlin.

In 1925 he started work in the area of almost periodic functions, simplifying the approach of Harald Bohr by use of compactness and approximate identity arguments. In 1933 he defined the Bochner integral, as it is now called, for vector-valued functions. Bochner's theorem on Fourier transforms appeared in a 1932 book.

Subsequently he worked on multiple Fourier series, posing the question of the Bochner-Riesz means.

In differential geometry, Bochner's formula on curvature from 1946 was most influential. Joint work with Kentaro Yano (1912-1993) led to the 1953 book Curvature and Betti Numbers. It had broad consequences, for the Kodaira vanishing theory, representation theory, and spin manifolds. Bochner also worked on several complex variables (the Bochner-Martinelli formula and the book Several Complex Variables from 1948 with W.