Amongst his teachers were Max Planck and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, whose influence made the young Siegel abandon astronomy and turn towards number theory instead.

Other notable students were Kurt Mahler, the number theorist, and Hel Braun who became one of the few female full professors in mathematics in Germany.

After the end of World War I, he enrolled at the University of Göttingen, studying under Landau, who was his doctoral thesis supervisor (PhD in 1920).

[5] In Frankfurt he took part with Dehn, Hellinger, Paul Epstein, and others in a seminar on the history of mathematics, which was conducted at the highest level.

In 1938, he returned to Göttingen before emigrating in 1940 via Norway to the United States, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had already spent a sabbatical in 1935.

When the prize committee decided to select the greatest living mathematician, the discussion centered around Siegel and Israel Gelfand as the leading candidates.

[7] Siegel's work spans analytic number theory; and his theorem on the finiteness of the integer points of curves, for genus > 1, is historically important as a major general result on diophantine equations, when the field was essentially undeveloped.