Heini Halberstam is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

, working in the field of analytic number theory

Analytic number theory

In mathematics, analytic number theory is a branch of number theory that uses methods from mathematical analysis to solve problems about the integers. It is often said to have begun with Dirichlet's introduction of Dirichlet L-functions to give the first proof of Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic...

. He is one of the two mathematicians after whom the Elliott-Halberstam conjecture

Elliott-Halberstam conjecture

In number theory, the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture is a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers in arithmetic progressions. It has many applications in sieve theory. It is named for Peter D. T. A. Elliott and Heini Halberstam....

 is named.

He was born in Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

 in 1927. His father died when he was very young. After Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

's annexation of the Sudetenland

Sudetenland

Sudetenland is the German name used in English in the first half of the 20th century for the northern, southwest and western regions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans, specifically the border areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and those parts of Silesia being within Czechoslovakia.The...

, he and his mother moved to Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

. At the age of twelve, as the Nazi occupation progressed, he was one of almost 10,000 children allowed to leave Nazi-occupied territory on the Kindertransport

Kindertransport

Kindertransport is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig...

 to England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, where he lived during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

.

He obtained his Ph.D. in 1952, from University College, London, under supervision of Theodor Estermann

Theodor Estermann

Theodor Estermann was a mathematician, working in the field of analytic number theory.He was born in Neubrandenburg, Germany. His doctorate, completed in 1925, was supervised by Hans Rademacher. Heini Halberstam, Klaus Roth and Robert Charles Vaughan were Ph.D. students of his.-External links:*...

. From 1962 until 1964 Halberstam was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (University of Dublin

University of Dublin

The University of Dublin , corporately designated the Chancellor, Doctors and Masters of the University of Dublin , located in Dublin, Ireland, was effectively founded when in 1592 Queen Elizabeth I issued a charter for Trinity College, Dublin, as "the mother of a university" – this date making it...

); From 1964 until 1980, Halberstam was a Professor of Mathematics at Nottingham University; in 1980, he took up a position at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC); he became an Emeritus Professor at UIUC in 1996.

He is known also for books, with Klaus Roth

Klaus Roth

Klaus Friedrich Roth is a British mathematician known for work on diophantine approximation, the large sieve, and irregularities of distribution. He was born in Breslau, Prussia, but raised and educated in the UK. He graduated from Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1945...

 on combinatorial number theory, and with H. E. Richert on sieve theory

Sieve theory

Sieve theory is a set of general techniques in number theory, designed to count, or more realistically to estimate the size of, sifted sets of integers. The primordial example of a sifted set is the set of prime numbers up to some prescribed limit X. Correspondingly, the primordial example of a...

.