After high school, Bers studied at the University of Zurich for a year, but had to return to Riga again because of the difficulty of transferring money from Latvia in the international financial crisis of the time.
In the aftermath of the Latvian coup in 1934 by right-wing leader Kārlis Ulmanis, Bers was targeted for arrest but fled the country, first to Estonia and then to Czechoslovakia.
In Prague, he lived with an aunt, and married his wife Mary (née Kagan) whom he had met in elementary school and who had followed him from Riga.
Having applied for postdoctoral studies in Paris, he was given a visa to go to France soon after the Munich Agreement, by which Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland.
[1][2][3][4] Bers spent World War II teaching mathematics as a research associate at Brown University, where he was joined by Loewner.
Through the 1940s and 1950s he continued to develop this theory, and to use it to study the planar elliptic partial differential equations associated with subsonic flows.
[6] Later, beginning with his visit to the Institute for Advanced Study, Bers "began a ten-year odyssey that took him from pseudoanalytic functions and elliptic equations to quasiconformal mappings, Teichmüller theory, and Kleinian groups".
[6] With Lars Ahlfors, he solved the "moduli problem", of finding a holomorphic parameterization of the Teichmüller space, each point of which represents a compact Riemann surface of a given genus.
Over the course of his career, Bers advised approximately 50 doctoral students,[11] among them Enrico Arbarello, Irwin Kra, Linda Keen, Murray H. Protter, and Lesley Sibner.
[2] As a small child with his mother in Saint Petersburg, Bers had cheered the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, but by the late 1930s he had become disillusioned with communism after the assassination of Sergey Kirov and Stalin's ensuing purges.
[3] He founded the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences,[4][13] and beginning in the 1970s worked to allow the emigration of dissident Soviet mathematicians including Yuri Shikhanovich, Leonid Plyushch, Valentin Turchin, and David and Gregory Chudnovsky.