Carl Samuel Herz (10 April 1930 – 1 May 1995) was an American-Canadian mathematician, specializing in harmonic analysis.

There he received a Ph.D. under the supervision of Salomon Bochner in 1953 with the dissertation "Bessel Functions of Matrix Argument".

[1] According to Tom H. Koornwinder, Herz's dissertation (published in the Annals of Mathematics in May 1955) "was a pioneering paper in the field of special functions in several variables associated with Lie groups and with root systems.

Herz did mathematical research on spectral synthesis, positive-definite functions, Fourier transforms on convex sets, potential theory, Hp, and BMO.

According to Nicholas Varopoulos, Herz made contributions "to the theory of symmetric spaces, Lie groups and the heat kernel on these; among other things he succeeded in classifying all faithful representations of Lie groups by contact transformations of a compact manifold.