Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet
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Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet. |
Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (
February 13,
1805 -
May 5,
1859) was a
German mathematician credited with the modern "formal" definition of a
function.
His family hailed from the town of
Richelet in
Belgium, from which his surname "Lejeune Dirichlet" ("le jeune de Richelet" = "the young chap from Richelet") was derived, and that was where his grandfather lived.
Dirichlet was born in
Düren, where his father was the
postmaster. He was educated in
Germany, and then
France, where he learnt from many of the most renowned mathematicians of the day. His first paper was on
Fermat's last theorem comprised of a partial proof for the case
n = 5, which was completed by
Adrien-Marie Legendre, who was one of the referees. Dirichlet also completed his own proof almost at the same time; he later also produced a full proof for the case
n = 14.
He married Rebecka Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who came from a distinguished family of converts from Judaism to Christianity; she was a granddaughter of the philosopher
Moses Mendelssohn, daughter of
Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy and a sister of the composer
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
Ferdinand Eisenstein,
Leopold Kronecker, and
Rudolf Lipschitz were his students. After his death, Dirichlet's lectures and other results in
number theory were collected, edited and published by his friend and fellow mathematician
Richard Dedekind under the title
Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie (
Lectures on Number Theory).
*
Dirichlet's theorem (
number theory,
1835)
*
Dirichlet characters (
number theory,
1831)
*
Dirichlet convolution (
number theory)
*
Dirichlet density (number theory)
*
Dirichlet distribution (probability theory)
*
Dirichlet kernel (
functional analysis,
Fourier series)
*
Dirichlet problem*
Dirichlet series*
Dirichlet tessellation*
Dirichlet boundary condition*
Dirichlet function*
Pigeonhole principle*
Dirichlet divisor problem*
* Dirichlet, Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune,
Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie. Braunschweig, 1863.
"Number Theory for the Millennium".
*
Biography of Dirichlet found at
Fermat's Last Theorem Blog
