Thomas Jean Stieltjes

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Thomas Jean Stieltjes

Thomas Jean Stieltjes (born December 29, 1856 in Zwolle , Netherlands , † December 31, 1894 in Toulouse ) was a Dutch mathematician .

During his studies, Stieltjes mainly occupied himself with the work of Gauß and Jacobi . His interest lay in the areas of analysis , continued fractions and number theory . After Stieltjes the term is Stieltjesintegrals named, of the integral concept of Bernhard Riemann ( Riemann integral generalized) and a special case of Lebesgueintegrals (after Henri Léon Lebesgue ) is.

Life

Stieltjes' father of the same name was responsible as a civil engineer for the construction of various ports around Rotterdam and was also a member of the States General , the Dutch parliament. The son studied from 1873 at the Polytechnic in Delft . Instead of attending the lectures, he mainly dealt with the work of Carl Friedrich Gauß and Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi , which, however, meant that he failed his exams. Nevertheless, thanks to his father's friendship with Hendricus Gerardus van de Sande Bakhuyzen (1838–1923), the rector of the University of Leiden , he received an assistant position at the Leiden observatory.

A short time later, Stieltjes began a lifelong correspondence with Charles Hermite . Initially the subject was celestial mechanics , but quickly switched to mathematics, to which he devoted his free time.

Van de Sande-Bakhuyzen granted Stieltjes' request on January 1, 1883 to give up work in the observatory and to deal more intensively with mathematics. In May of the same year, Stieltjes married Elizabeth Intveld, who also supported his move from astronomy to mathematics. In September he received a call from the Royal Polytechnic in Delft , where he held lectures on analytical geometry and descriptive geometry until December . At the end of the year he resigned from the observatory.

In 1884 he applied for a chair in Groningen . Initially accepted, he was rejected by the Ministry of Education for lack of a diploma. Hermite and Professor Bierens de Haan then ensured that he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leiden , which should pave the way for him to a professorship. In 1885 he was accepted as an honorary member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, KNAW) and in 1889 he was appointed professor of differential and integral calculus at the University of Toulouse . There he died at the age of only 38. Shortly before his death, on December 3, 1894, he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg .

In 1992 a mathematical research institute at the University of Leiden was named after him. It was merged in 2011 in the newly founded Dutch mathematics research institute WONDER (Wiskunde ONDERzoekschool Nederland). In 2002 the asteroid (30443) Stieltjes was named after him.

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Thomas Johannes Stieltjes. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed October 24, 2015 (Russian).
personal data
SURNAME Stieltjes, Thomas Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1856
PLACE OF BIRTH Zwolle , Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1894
Place of death Toulouse