BERGMAN Origin of surname

Michael Balint (Mihaly Bergmann) (1896-1970), psychoanalyst.

Born in Hungary, the son of a practising physician. During World War I he served in the front line. After the war he completed his studies in medicine and began to take an interest in psychology. In 1920 he and his wife, who was also interested in psychoanalysis, moved to Berlin, Germany. In 1924 they returned to Budapest, Hungary, and the couple devoted their lives to the research and practice to the development of psychoanalysis as a science. Political conditions in Hungary made the teaching of psychotherapy by a Jew (albeit one who had changed his name and converted to Christianity) practically impossible, and they emigrated to Manchester, England. His work is discussed in his "The Doctor, His Patient and the Illness" (1957), and "Psychotherapeutic Techniques in Medicine" (1961).

In 1945, after his first wife had died, he moved to London continuing his group work with practicing physicians, and obtaining a Master of Science degree in psychology. In the 1950s he became the leader of a group of psychologists known as the Balint group. In 1968 Balint became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Balint also devoted extensive research to understanding the mechanism of human sexuality, concentrating in large part on sexual perversions and their relation to neurotic and psychotic symptoms. In addition to writing "Problems of Human Pleasure and Behavior" (1957), he edited several anthologies on the subject of sexuality.

Ernst David Bergmann (1903-1975), scientist, born in Karlsruhe, Germany. He studied at the university of Berlin and taught there from 1928 to 1933. The following year he moved to the Land of Israel as scientific director of the Sieff Institute and in 1949 of the Weizmann Institute of Science, holding this post until 1952. During World War II he engaged in scientific work in France and England and served on the technical committee of the Hagana. From 1952 to 1966 he was chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and director of the scientific research department of the Israeli ministry of defense, From 1953 Bergmann was professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University. He made major contributions to Israel's atomic program and was awarded the Israel Prize in 1968.

Lucian Bratu (born Lucian Fred Bergmann)(1924-1998), film director born in Bucharest, Romania. He graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts of Bucharest in 1948 and the Union Institute of Cinematographic Art in Moscow, USSR, in 1955. For most years of his career, Bratu worked under the restrictions of the freedom of speech and creativity that characterized the communist regime of Romania. His first feature film launched in 1959, Secretul cifrului ("The Secret of the Code"), was a film adaptation of the spy novel La miezul nopții va cădea o stea ("A Star Will Fall At Midnight") by Theodore Constantine. In 1962, Bratu directed the movie Tudor dedicated to Tudor Vladimirescu, a Romanian revolutionary hero, thus opening a series of historical films produced during those years in Romania. After 1970, he was involved in the training of amateur cinema artists.

In 1978, he settled in the United States and collaborated with the screenwriter Petru Popescu for the screenplay of The Last Wave directed by Peter Weir as well as writing the script for the movie Death of an Angel. Starting in 1990, following his return to Romania after the 1989 revolution, Bratu lectured at the Theater and Film Academy in Bucharest. He died in Bucharest.

Stefan Bergman (Bergmann) (1895-1977), mathematician, born in Czestochowa, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). He studied at the University of Berlin earning a PhD in 1921 and joined Richard von Mises Institute for Applied Mathematics at Berlin University in the same year. Following the rise to power of the Nazi regime in Germany, he fled to the Soviet Union, staying there until 1939, when he moved to Paris, France. The same year he immigrated to the United States, where he was a professor at Stanford University from 1952 to 1972.
His main area of study was the theory of analytic functions of one or several complex variables and its application to problems of electrodynamics and the mechanics of continua. Some of Bergmann’s well-known discoveries are the Bergmann reproducing kernel, as well as the Bergmann-Shilov boundary for certain classes of domains in the theory of functions of several complex variables and the related generalization of Cauchy’s integral formula. In the monograph Integral Operators in the Theory of Linear Partial Differential Equations (1969), Bergmann constructed integral operators which transform analytic functions of complex variables into solutions of various classes of linear partial differential equations with analytic coefficients. This led to a unified theory for a large class of linear partial differential equations. The starting point for this idea is the connection – well-known since Euler – that exists between harmonic functions of two real variables and analytic functions of a complex variable. Stefan Bergmann died in Palo Alto, California.