Philipp Ludwig von Seidel (; 24 October 1821 in
Zweibrücken
Zweibrücken (; french: Deux-Ponts, ; Palatinate German: ''Zweebrigge'', ; literally translated as "Two Bridges") is a town in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, on the Schwarzbach river.
Name
The name ''Zweibrücken'' means 'two bridges'; old ...
,
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...
– 13 August 1896 in
Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and ...
,
German Empire
The German Empire (),Herbert Tuttle wrote in September 1881 that the term "Reich" does not literally connote an empire as has been commonly assumed by English-speaking people. The term literally denotes an empire – particularly a hereditary ...
) was a German
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
. He was the son of Julie Reinhold and Justus Christian Felix Seidel.
Lakatos credits von Seidel with discovering, in 1847, the crucial analytic concept of
uniform convergence
In the mathematical field of analysis, uniform convergence is a mode of convergence of functions stronger than pointwise convergence. A sequence of functions (f_n) converges uniformly to a limiting function f on a set E if, given any arbitrarily ...
, while analyzing an incorrect proof of
Cauchy
Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy (, ; ; 21 August 178923 May 1857) was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He w ...
's.
In 1857, von Seidel decomposed the first order monochromatic
aberrations into five constituent aberrations. They are now commonly referred to as
the five Seidel Aberrations.
The lunar crater
Seidel is named after him. His doctoral students include
Eduard Study and
Hermann Wiener.
The
Gauss–Seidel method is a useful numerical iterative method for solving linear systems.
See also
*
Seidel triangle
References
External links
Biography University of St. Andrews
1821 births
1896 deaths
19th-century German mathematicians
{{Germany-mathematician-stub