H. Halberstam (1926–2014)

Heini Halberstam was born to a Jewish family in Most, Czechoslovakia. His parents were Judita and Rabbi Michael Halberstam. His father died suddenly when Heini was 10 years old. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland, Heini and his mother moved to Prague. In 1939, after increasing Nazi persecution, his mother made the decision to send Heini to safety in England on a Kindertransport. They never saw each other again; Judita was deported by the Nazis soon afterwards. Heini had a loving foster mother in England, Anne Welsford, who encouraged him to go to university. He read mathematics at University College London, and earned his PhD in 1952 under the supervision of Theodor Estermann. From 1962 until 1964, Halberstam was the prestigious Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin. From 1964 until 1980, he was a professor of Mathematics at the University of Nottingham. In 1980, he moved to the USA to join the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and taught there for the rest of his career; he was named Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 1996. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Prof. Halberstam was the author of several acclaimed books, including Sequences (1966) with Klaus Roth and Sieves Methods (1976) with H.E. Richert.