Elisha Netanyahu
Elisha Netanyahu was an Israeli mathematician specializing in complex analysis. Over the course of his work at the Technion he was the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and established the separate Department of Mathematics. He was the brother of historian Benzion Netanyahu and the uncle of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biography
Elisha Netanyahu was born in Warsaw, Poland, to Sarah and the Russian Jewish writer and Zionist activist Nathan Mileikowsky. He was the third of nine children. In 1920 the family made aliyah to the Land of Israel. The family eventually settled in Jerusalem and adopted Hebrew name Netanyahu.Elisha Netanyahu went to the Reali School in Haifa, from which he graduated in 1930. He later returned to Reali in 1935 to teach mathematics there. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from which he received his BS, MA and PhD. His advisors were Michael Fekete and Binyamin Amirà. After the graduation he joined the British Army as a volunteer, serving in Egypt and then in Italy as an officer in a unit of the Royal Engineering Corps. He specialized in preparation of maps, which he continued to do during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
After he was demobilized in 1946, he became a lecturer at the Technion. He rose to a professor in 1958, and later became the head of the Mathematics Section, then as Dean of the Faculty of Sciences. His administrative efforts also played an important role towards establishment of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
He had long term visits at Stanford University, NYU, the University of New Mexico, the University of Maryland, College Park, and ETH Zürich. In 1980, Netanyahu retired from the Technion and moved to Jerusalem, where he died of cancer in 1986.
Throughout his long career, Netanyahu collaborated with Paul Erdős, Charles Loewner and other leading mathematicians, continuing and expanding the analytical traditions at the Technion.