Leon was born in New York City to a family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and studied Mathematics as an undergraduate at City College of New York. Afterward, he enrolled as a doctoral student at Columbia University where he studied under mathematician Claude Chevalley, obtaining his PhD in 1953 at the age of 23. His doctoral thesis was entitled "Theory of Distributions in Locally Compact Spaces".[1]
Religion
Ehrenpreis was also a Rabbi, having received his ordination from the renowned Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.[2] He was the author of a work on the Chumash and other religious topics, currently in manuscript.
Ehrenpreis, Leon (1954), "Solution of some problems of division. I. Division by a polynomial of derivation", Amer. J. Math., 76 (4): 883–903, doi:10.2307/2372662, JSTOR2372662, MR0068123
—— (1955), "Solution of some problems of division. II. Division by a punctual distribution", Amer. J. Math., 77 (2): 286–292, doi:10.2307/2372532, JSTOR2372532, MR0070048
Grinberg, Eric L. (2000), Analysis, Geometry, Number Theory: The Mathematics of Leon Ehrenpreis, American Mathematical Society, p. 508, ISBN0-8218-1148-7