15 Facts About Gotthold Eisenstein

Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein was a German mathematician.

Gotthold Eisenstein specialized in number theory and analysis, and proved several results that eluded even Gauss.

Gotthold Eisenstein suffered various health problems throughout his life, including meningitis as an infant, a disease that took the lives of all five of his brothers and sisters.

Gotthold Eisenstein's teachers recognized his talents in mathematics, but by 15 years of age he had already learned all the material taught at the school.

Gotthold Eisenstein then began to study differential calculus from the works of Leonhard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.

At 17, still a student, Gotthold Eisenstein began to attend classes given by Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet and others at the University of Berlin.

In 1843 Gotthold Eisenstein returned to Berlin, where he passed his graduation exams and enrolled in the University the following autumn.

In June 1844 Gotthold Eisenstein visited Carl Friedrich Gauss in Gottingen.

Jacobi encouraged the distinction, but later relations between Jacobi and Gotthold Eisenstein were always rocky, due primarily to a disagreement over the order of discoveries made in 1846.

In 1847 Gotthold Eisenstein habilitated at the University of Berlin, and he began to teach there.

In 1848 Gotthold Eisenstein was imprisoned briefly by the Prussian army for his revolutionary activities in Berlin.

Gotthold Eisenstein always had republican sympathies, and while he did not actively participate in the revolution of 1848, he was arrested on 19 March of that year.

Gotthold Eisenstein died of tuberculosis at the age of 29.

Gotthold Eisenstein had recently obtained, too late, as it turned out, the funding necessary to send Eisenstein on holiday to Sicily.

For example, a letter from Gauss to Humboldt, dated the 14th of April in 1846, says that Gotthold Eisenstein's talent is one that nature bestows only a few times a century.