Moritz Abraham Stern (29 June 1807 – 30 January 1894) was a German mathematician. Stern became ''Ordinarius'' (full professor) at Göttingen University in 1858, succeeding Carl Friedrich Gauss. Stern was the first Jewish full professor at a German university who attained the position without changing his Jewish religion. Although Carl Gustav Jacobi preceded him (by three decades) as the first Jew to obtain a math professorial chair in Germany, Jacobi's family had converted to Christianity long before then. As a professor, Stern taught Gauss's student

Bernhard Riemann Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (; 17 September 1826 – 20 July 1866) was a German mathematician who made contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first rig ...

. Stern was very helpful to Gotthold Eisenstein in formulating a proof of the quadratic reciprocity theorem. Stern was interested in primes that cannot be expressed as the sum of a prime and twice a square (now known as

Stern prime A Stern prime, named for Moritz Abraham Stern, is a prime number that is not the sum of a smaller prime and twice the square of a non zero integer. That is, if for a prime ''q'' there is no smaller prime ''p'' and nonzero integer ''b'' such that ' ...

s). He is known for formulating Stern's diatomic series. :1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 4, … that counts the number of ways to write a number as a sum of powers of two with no power used more than twice. He is also known for the Stern–Brocot tree, which he wrote about in 1858 and which Brocot independently discovered in 1861.

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* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Stern, Moritz Abraham 1807 births 1894 deaths 19th-century German Jews 19th-century German mathematicians University of Göttingen faculty