German, and he received the highest score in the city, which garnered him financial support from a wealthy Berlin Jew. At the gymnasium he developed a great love for classics and history, which he maintained throughout his life, but he chose to pursue mathematics professionally, because he felt that it was a surer career path.

He received his doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Berlin in 1921. The elder Constantin Carathéodory and he became good friends during this time. According to an online mathematics genealogy project,²¹ Bochner’s thesis adviser was Erhard Schmidt. In later years Bochner would not say much about Schmidt. Instead he would occasionally say, with a little smile, that in his observation, a mathematician often took after his mathematical grandfather. In Bochner’s case this was David Hilbert.

The time when Bochner got his degree was a time of hyperinflation in Germany, and his family was in desperate straits financially. As a consequence Bochner did not immediately take an academic job but instead went into the family import-export business, doing mathematics only recreationally. Over a period of four years he did extremely well at the business. Despite this success his family could see that his real interest was in mathematics, and they encouraged him to return to mathematics full time. He did so, and on the basis particularly of his paper (1925) he became an International Education Board fellow at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the University of Copenhagen for 1925-1927. In England he became good friends with G. H. Hardy, and they wrote one paper together. In 1927 at the end of the fellowship he became a lecturer at the University of Munich.

Like many untenured academic Jews in Germany, Bochner was dismissed from his position during the 1932-1933 year. For the second time he became a refugee; he went to England,