Arthur Moritz Schoenflies

Schoenflies was born in Landsberg an der Warthe (modern Gorzów, Poland). Arthur Schoenflies married Emma Levin (1868–1939) in 1896. He studied under Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass, and was influenced by Felix Klein.

The Schoenflies problem is to prove that an ${\displaystyle (n-1)}$-sphere in Euclidean n-space bounds a topological ball, however embedded. This question is much more subtle than it initially appears.

He studied at the University of Berlin from 1870 to 1875. He obtained a doctorate in 1877, and in 1878 he was a teacher at a school in Berlin. In 1880, he went to Colmar to teach.

Schoenflies was a frequent contributor to Klein's Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences: In 1898 he wrote on set theory, in 1902 on kinematics, and on projective geometry in 1910.

He was a great-uncle of Walter Benjamin.