Max Mason

Charles Max Mason ( born October 26, 1877 in Madison, Wisconsin, † March 23, 1961 in Claremont, California ) was an American mathematician and physicist.

Life

Mason in 1903 received his doctorate at the University of Göttingen with David Hilbert with the dissertation " boundary value problems for ordinary differential equations ". Then he went back to the United States where he taught mathematics until he was in 1909 appointed as a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin. Mason was then 1925-1929 President of the University of Chicago and from 1929 to 1936 president of the Rockefeller Foundation. As president of the Rockefeller Foundation, he promoted particularly the resettlement of the displaced by the Nazis from the University of Göttingen mathematician, which the Foundation had only a few years before facing a new institute building in Göttingen.

His research was on the areas of differential equations, the calculus of variations and of electromagnetism.

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