The German mathematician Schwarz received his doctorate degree in 1864, under the direction of Karl Weierstrass. He taught at the universities in Halle, Zurich, Göttingen, and finally Berlin.
Schwarz made important contributions to conformal mappings, the Dirichlet problem, and minimal surfaces. To students of analysis, he is best known for the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, relating the inner product with the product of the norms, co-named with Augustin Cauchy. This inequality has also been attributed to several other mathematicians.