He was born in Waltdorf (near Neiße, Upper Silesia, now Nysa, Poland), and died in Sulzburg-Laufen, West Germany.

He was a student at Carolinum in Nysa and then Hamburg University where his advisor was Wilhelm Blaschke.

[1] It has several proofs and numerous generalizations, including the Sperner property of a partially ordered set.

[2] It was proven by Sperner to provide an alternate proof of a theorem of Lebesgue characterizing dimensionality of Euclidean spaces.

It was later noticed that this lemma provides a direct proof of the Brouwer fixed-point theorem without explicit use of homology.