About the book (1948) S. Krantz says,²⁰ in reviewing the volumes of collected papers, “The book by Bochner and Martin … was among the first on the subject of several complex variables; although there are now many books on the subject, that volume is frequently cited in the modern literature.” About Bochner’s work as a whole, Krantz continues, “Not only did Bochner touch many areas of mathematics, but his ideas are so profound that they are still of great interest today.”

Salomon Bochner, son of Joseph and Rude Bochner, was born on August 20, 1899, into a Jewish family of modest means in the Polish city of Krakow, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His brilliance was already evident to the teachers in his Jewish elementary school, and when Bochner was nine years old, one of them predicted that he would make his living as a mathematician. In 1915 shortly after the outbreak of World War I, the threat of a Russian invasion of Austria-Hungary led the Bochner family to flee to Germany, which at that time was seen as more hospitable to Jews than was Russia, or even Austria-Hungary. One example of this greater openness was the fact that, unlike in Krakow, the state schools, including the prestigious gymnasia, made accommodations for orthodox Jewish children whose religious practices did not allow them to write on Saturdays, which was a school day. When his family arrived in Berlin, Bochner immediately took the entrance examination for a gymnasium, without having studied much