Henry Blumberg, Ph.D.

Henry Blumberg was born on May 13, 1886 in Zhagory, Russia to Bernhard and Yetta (Schochet) Blumberg. He immigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1891. He attended Columbia University and was awarded an A.B. in 1907, receiving the John Dash Van Buren, Jr. Prize in Mathematics, and an A.M. in 1908.

He then studied at the University of Göttingen where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1912, writing a thesis entitled "On the algebraic properties of linear homogeneous differential equations" under the direction of Edmund Landau. He then spent another year doing postdoctoral work at the universities of Chicago, Paris and Zurich.

He was then employed as an assistant and later assistant professor at the University of Nebraska 1913-1918. He was then appointed assistant professor at the University of Illinois in 1918, where he remained until 1925.

In 1925 he was appointed professor in the Department of Mathematics at Ohio State. Blumberg was very instrumental in establishing a graduate program in mathematics at OSU. He directed eight Ph.D. students at Ohio State. Among his students was the prominent real analyst Casper Goffman.

Blumberg was a very active researcher in the fields of real analysis and point set topology. One of his striking results is the following: for any real-valued function defined over the reals, there is is a dense subset of the domain, such that the restriction of the function to this subset is continuous.

Blumberg was also very active in the U.S. and international mathematics community. He served as an associate editor of the Annals of Mathematics, the American Mathematical Monthly and Zentralblatt für Mathematik. He also served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society.

He died in Columbus on June 28, 1950.

Henry Blumberg

• 1910 United States Federal Census
• Birth: Circa 1887 - Russia
• Residence: 1910 - Brooklyn Ward 21, Kings, New York, USA
• Parents: Bernhard Blumberg, Yetta Blumberg
• Siblings: Leopold Blumberg, Mayer Blumberg