Background material

Institut Mittag-Leffler

Institut Mittag-Leffler was founded in 1916 by Gösta Mittag-Leffler and his wife Signe, whose maiden name was Lindfors. The operation of the institute was taken over by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1919.

Gösta Mittag-Leffler (1846-1927) was an influential Swedish mathematician and business man. Like Lennart Carleson he was educated in Uppsala, where he received his doctoral degree in 1872. After living abroad for many years in Paris, Berlin and Helsinki, he returned to his birthplace of Stockholm and held the first mathematics professorship at the city's new university. As a university professor, Mittag-Leffler had many irons in the fire, e.g. he founded Acta Mathematica, a prestigious journal that is still issued under the direction of Institut Mittag-Leffler.

Throughout his life, Gösta Mittag-Leffler was a bibliophile, and his collection of books eventually became quite impressive. With his wife's inheritance, and later with his own earnings, he could buy almost anything he wanted; and what he did not spend on books, he spent on building himself a little palace at Djursholm, an upper-class suburb just north of Stockholm. In his last will and testament, which he made public on his 70th birthday in 1916, Mittag-Leffler provided the basis for a foundation with the purpose of promoting research in pure mathematics in the Scandinavian countries. This foundation was supposed to run the big library at Djursholm and simultaneously support a research institute with ample access to scholarships for young mathematicians, based on the model of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 1916, Mittag-Leffler's wealth was so great that these were highly realistic plans, but the stock market crash in 1922 changed the situation dramatically and by the time of Mittag-Leffler's death in 1927 there was very little left with which to realise his ambitious plans.

After that, Institut Mittag-Leffler remained involuntarily dormant for decades until Lennart Carleson took over as director in 1969. Carleson acquired a new financial base for the institute through contributions from the Wallenberg Foundation and several insurance companies. In addition, contracts were signed for support from the research councils in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. This made it possible for Carleson to start building up the institute the way Mittag-Leffler had indicated in his last will and testament. One thing that Mittag-Leffler and Carleson had in common was their support of young mathematicians, and in the institute that emerged under Carleson's direction, this group was given special attention. Carleson remained director of the institute until 1984 and handed over an institute that promised to become great.

Today, the institute is one of the most attractive research institutions of its kind in the world, visited by hundreds of mathematicians each year, including many of the most prominent ones. The fields of research at the institute change each year and a steady stream of new mathematicians are given an opportunity to visit Gösta Mittag-Leffler's magnificent library and take part in seminars in the old dining room, where both Ibsen and Strindberg enjoyed the mathematics professor's generosity in bygone days. In the academic year 2001-2002, Lennart Carleson himself was back at the institute, as one of three leaders for a year that focused on Probability and Conformal Mappings.

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