19 Facts About Leopold Kronecker

Heinrich Weber quoted Kronecker as having said, "".

Leopold Kronecker was a student and life-long friend of Ernst Kummer.

Leopold Kronecker was born on 7 December 1823 in Liegnitz, Prussia in a wealthy Jewish family.

Leopold Kronecker then went to the Liegnitz Gymnasium where he was interested in a wide range of topics including science, history and philosophy, while practicing gymnastics and swimming.

In 1841 Leopold Kronecker became a student at the University of Berlin where his interest did not immediately focus on mathematics, but rather spread over several subjects including astronomy and philosophy.

Back in Berlin, Leopold Kronecker studied mathematics with Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet and in 1845 defended his dissertation in algebraic number theory written under Dirichlet's supervision.

Leopold Kronecker went back to his hometown to manage a large farming estate built up by his mother's uncle, a former banker.

For several years Leopold Kronecker focused on business, and although he continued to study mathematics as a hobby and corresponded with Kummer, he published no mathematical results.

Leopold Kronecker became a close friend of Karl Weierstrass, who had recently joined the university, and his former teacher Kummer who had just taken over Dirichlet's mathematics chair.

In 1866, when Riemann died, Leopold Kronecker was offered the mathematics chair at the University of Gottingen, but he refused, preferring to keep his position at the Academy.

Only in 1883, when Kummer retired from the university, was Leopold Kronecker invited to succeed him and became an ordinary professor.

Leopold Kronecker was the supervisor of Kurt Hensel, Adolf Kneser, Mathias Lerch, and Franz Mertens, amongst others.

Leopold Kronecker died on 29 December 1891 in Berlin, several months after the death of his wife.

Leopold Kronecker is buried in the Alter St Matthaus Kirchhof cemetery in Berlin-Schoneberg, close to Gustav Kirchhoff.

An important part of Leopold Kronecker's research focused on number theory and algebra.

Leopold Kronecker introduced the structure theorem for finitely-generated abelian groups.

Leopold Kronecker studied elliptic functions and conjectured his "liebster Jugendtraum", a generalization that was later put forward by Hilbert in a modified form as his twelfth problem.

Leopold Kronecker contributed to the concept of continuity, reconstructing the form of irrational numbers in real numbers.

Leopold Kronecker's finitism made him a forerunner of intuitionism in foundations of mathematics.