14 Facts About Karl Weierstrass

Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass was a German mathematician often cited as the "father of modern analysis".

Karl Weierstrass later received an honorary doctorate and became professor of mathematics in Berlin.

Karl Weierstrass was born into a Roman Catholic family in Ostenfelde, a village near Ennigerloh, in the Province of Westphalia.

Karl Weierstrass was the son of Wilhelm Weierstrass and Theodora Vonderforst, the former of whom was a government official and both of whom were Catholic Rhinelanders.

Karl Weierstrass's interest in mathematics began while he was a gymnasium student at the Theodorianum in Paderborn.

Karl Weierstrass resolved the conflict by paying little heed to his planned course of study but continuing to study mathematics in private, which ultimately resulted in his leaving the university without a degree.

Karl Weierstrass continued to study mathematics at the Munster Academy, and his father was able to obtain a place for him in a teacher-training school in Munster; his efforts there did, eventually, lead to his certification as a teacher in that city.

In 1870, at the age of fifty-five, Karl Weierstrass met Sofia Kovalevskaya whom he tutored privately after failing to secure her admission to the university.

Karl Weierstrass mentored her for four years, and regarded her as his best student, helping to secure her a doctorate from Heidelberg University without the need for an oral thesis defense.

Karl Weierstrass was immobile for the last three years of his life, and died in Berlin from pneumonia on the 19th of February, 1897.

Karl Weierstrass was interested in the soundness of calculus, and at the time there were somewhat ambiguous definitions of the foundations of calculus so that important theorems could not be proven with sufficient rigour.

Karl Weierstrass saw the importance of the concept, and both formalized it and applied it widely throughout the foundations of calculus.

The formal definition of continuity of a function, as formulated by Karl Weierstrass, is as follows:.

Karl Weierstrass made advances in the field of calculus of variations.