Heine Halberstam (1926 - 2014) | University of Illinois Archives

Professor Heini Halberstam (1926 - 2014), (professional career: 1962 - 1996) University of Illinois Professor Emeritus of Mathematics (1996), was a celebrated researcher in the field of analytic number theory. The Czech-born British mathematician is best known for his part in the Elliot-Halberstam conjecture. Heine was born in Most, Czechoslovakia, to Rabbi Michael and Judith Halberstamova. As anti-Semitism and the Nazi party spread across Europe, Heini was sent to England aboard the Kindertransport (German for "children's transport") when he was twelve years old. . The Kindertransport was a British program prior to World War II that accepted nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children refugees from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Danzig. In London Heini earned a PhD in Mathematics (1952) from the University of London, and then went onto teach at Trinity College Dublin (1962 - 1964), where he the Erasmus Smiths Professor of Mathematics. He also taught at the University of Nottingham (1964 - 1980), where he helped start the Shell Centre for Mathematical Education. He then accepted a position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1980 - 1996) and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 1996.

Professor Halberstam was an internationally recognized figure in the field of number theory. His research included Warings problem, mean value theorems, probabilistic methods, combinatorial number theory, and small and large sieves. He collaborated with many colleagues in his research including Harold Davenport, Peter Elliot, Klaus Roth, Hans-Egan Richert, and Harold Diamond. He has many publications of note including Sieves, which he co-authored with Klaus Roth, Sequences, and Sieve Theory and A Higher Dimensional Sieve Method.

During his career Professor Halberstam was a member of the London Mathematical Society where he served as the Vice President and as Secretary of the London Mathematical Society Journal. He was also a member of the American Mathematical Society. Additionally, throughout his career he held positions at Brown, Michigan, UC-Berkeley, Syracuse, Ohio State, Paris, Ulm, Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa, Tel Aviv, York, Hong Kong, and Matscience (India). He authored over 150 journal articles and completed 10 volumes of collected mathematical papers.

Professor Heine Halberstam passed away in 2014 at the age of 87.