1875 – 1941

Issai Schur was a quiet, naive mathematician who had very little time for religion or politics. He could never understand the Nazi preoccupation with his Jewish heritage. In his mind, he was a German – not a Jew. Ousted from his respected academic position in Germany, he ended up in Palestine where he died in poverty on his 66th birthday.

We remember him with the grade two $1,000,000 unsolved problem which he posed in 1916.  Mathematicians call it Schur’s Sum-Free Partition Problem, but despite the big words, this problem belongs in every grade 2 classroom learning addition.