Lugwig Berwald was born on December 8, 1883, in Prague.
He always listed his religion in the school catalogue as Jewish. He entered the
Royal Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich in the Fall of 1892, where he
pursued his studies in mathematics and physics. In December of 1908, he earned
his doctorate under professor Auriel Voss with his dissertation Über die
Krümmungseigenschaften der Brennflachen eines geradlinigen Strahlsystems und der
in ihm enthaltenen Regelflächen.
In 1915, Berwald married Hedwig
Adler, who had also been born in Prague. After that, he became a lecturer at the
German University in Prague. He was promoted to an associate professorship in
1922, and became a full professor in 1924.
On October 22, 1941, Berwald's scientific work came to a close. The Berwalds were deported to the Ghetto in Lodz, Poland, by order of the German Secret Police. Mrs Berwald died on March 27, 1942. Cause of death: Blocked arteries. Professor Ludwig Berwald died a few weeks later on April 20th. Cause of death: Intestinal catarrh, heart failure.
Berwald's scientific work is mainly in the area of differential geometry. He wrote 54 papers until the time of his deportation. A portion of his work set up the basic theory of Finsler geometry and Spray geometry (i.e. differential geometry of path spaces). Many people working in Finsler geometry consider that Ludwig Berwald is the founder of Finsler geometry.
Berwald and E Cartan developed a general theory of two-dimensional Finsler spaces. Berwald wrote a series of major papers On Finsler and Cartan geometries. Jesse Douglas, reviewing the third of these writes:-
The principal problem (due to P Funk) solved in this paper is that of characterising in an invariant manner all two-dimensional Finsler spaces which can be mapped geodesically on a Euclidean plane ("Finsler spaces with rectilinear extremals"). In the case where the Finsler space is Riemannian, this problem reduces to the classic one of Beltrami solved by surfaces of constant curvature.
Thanks to Zhongmin Shen for most of the information in
the above biography.