# Who are the mathematicians Cammaille and Schouder, mentioned by Heisenberg when recalling mathematicians who died during the Second World War?

I found there (on page 98) the following quote :

Heisenberg: During the war I had five calls for help in cases where people were murdered by our people. One was Soloman, Hoffman's son-in law. I could do nothing in his case as he had already been killed when I got the letter. The second one was Cousyns the Belgian cosmic ray man; he disappeared in a Gestapo camp and I couldn't even find out through Himmler's staff whether he was alive or dead. I presume he is dead too. Then there was the mathematician Cammaille; I tried to do something about him through Sethel but it was no good he was shot. Then from among the Polish professors there was a logistician with a Jewish name — and then with the other Poles the following happened: his name was Schouder, a mathematician. He had written to me and I had put out feelers in order to see what could be done. I wrote to Scholz who had something to do with Poland. [...] I heard nothing more about Schouder and I have now been told that he was murdered.

Does anyone know who Cammaille and Schouder are ? I tried to search some information about them but I found nothing.

Thank you !

Julius Pawel Schauder was a very famous mathematician. He worked in Lwow (Lviv, Lvov, Lemberg). He is remembered for the "Leray-Schauder degree", and "Leray-Schauder Theorem", this is a cornerstone of the important area called Non-linear Functional Analysis, "Schauder basis" and many other things. He worked in functional analysis, and in fact was one of the main creators of this discipline.

When the German troops occupied Lwow, he was restricted to the ghetto. He wrote letters to German mathematicians, asking to help him. The story about these letters is told in detail in the book on Caratheodory cited in Mauro Allegranza answer. Nobody did anything to help him, and he perished. It is not known exactly when and where he died, but apparently he was deported with the others to one of the extermination camps.

There is a Wikipedia article about him, and also a biography in MacTutor.

As his name is misspelled in the citation you give, I suppose that the other name is also misspelled. But I cannot determine who is the other person Heisenberg mentioned. There is a (very incomplete) list of "Mathematicians who died in the Holocaust" in Wikipedia. A much more complete list is included in the book by A. W. Goodman, Univalent functions, chapter 18. (Mariner Publishing Co., Inc., Tampa, FL, 1983.) I also could not determine who was "a logistician with a Jewish name". Shortly after occupation of Lwow, the Germans killed 25 Polish professors, see "Massacre of Lviv Professors" on Wikipedia, but there is no logician among them.

• Schauder was a coworker of Jean Leray, as remembered above. As a curious, though dramatic, fate, Leray passed all WWII in a prisoner camp in Austria (he was a French officer). At the end of the war he met Schauder's daughter, who had survived concentration camps, and helped her recovering from illness, taking care of her in Paris. Afterwards Schauder0s saughter would move to Italy (where Schauder's brother was living) but the two remained in contact throughout their lives. – Nicola Ciccoli Feb 14 '16 at 12:06
• @Nicola Ciccoli: Leray's imprisonment is mentioned on this site here: hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/322/… . Thanks for the additional details. – Alexandre Eremenko Feb 14 '16 at 13:50
• May not be of any help, but "logistician" (if not misspelled) is not "logician" -- probably means someone who works in logistics, i.e. what is now called Operations Research etc. – ShreevatsaR Dec 28 '19 at 20:44
• ShreevatsaR: You did not notice quotation marks! I literally cited what was written in the question. In the next sentence I used the correct word. – Alexandre Eremenko Dec 28 '19 at 23:37
• To be clear, I wasn't saying that "logistician" is a misspelling of "logician" -- I was suggesting that Heisenberg may have really meant "logistician" (rather than it being a misspelling). That is, the person Heisenberg was referring to may have worked on logistics, not logic. Anyway, as it appears the original recording/conversation is not available (which presumably would have happened in German) and we only have the English translation, it is hard to know which one Heisenberg said/meant. – ShreevatsaR Dec 30 '19 at 0:11

For the second one, see:

the mathematician Schauder [...]. The name is wrongly spelled as "Schouder".

Juliusz Paweł Schauder (September 21, 1899, Lwów, Austria-Hungary – September 1943, Lwów, Occupied Poland).

• Thank you. This is what I thought. But I have no idea for the first one… – Watson Feb 6 '16 at 11:17
• @Watson - other sources have "Camaille"; in any case, no hints found on Internet. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Feb 7 '16 at 9:52

“Cammaille” or “Camaille” sound like misspellings for Jean Cavaillès. This seems confirmed by CERN Bulletin Issue No. 18/1999, which on page 15 (numbered 2) quotes Catherine Chevalley:

Heisenberg the physicist who “apparently tried, from within Germany, to save Cavaillès”$^1$.

$^1$Catherine Chevalley: in her preface to “Werner Heisenberg” (see footnote 3 below) page 12, note 1 (...)

$^3$“Werner Heisenberg: Philosophie, manuscrit de 1942”, translation and introduction by C. Chevalley, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1998 (...)

Max Cosyns, professor at the Free University of Brussels, survived Dachau.

• Hi, Yves, welcome to History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange. I'm not sure Cosysns is the right answer here - the last name is different. Can you explain your answer a little more? – HDE 226868 Jul 12 '17 at 2:14
• This does not seem to answer the question. – Danu Jul 12 '17 at 16:05
• I do think that this is the right answer, given the fact that misspellings of names are common in protocols of oral conversations: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Cosyns – Jan Peter Schäfermeyer Jul 14 '17 at 11:22