Philipp Ludwig von Seidel (; 24 October 1821 in

Zweibrücken Zweibrücken (; ; , ; literally translated as "Two Bridges") is a town in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, on the Schwarzbach (Blies), Schwarzbach River. Name The name ''Zweibrücken'' means 'two bridges'; older forms of the name include Middl ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

– 13 August 1896 in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

German Empire The German Empire (),; ; World Book, Inc. ''The World Book dictionary, Volume 1''. World Book, Inc., 2003. p. 572. States that Deutsches Reich translates as "German Realm" and was a former official name of Germany. also referred to as Imperia ...

) 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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. He was the son of Julie Reinhold and Justus Christian Felix Seidel. Philosopher & math theorist

Imre Lakatos Imre Lakatos (, ; ; 9 November 1922 – 2 February 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pre-axiomatic stage ...

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 as the function domain i ...

, while analyzing an incorrect proof put forth earlier by

Augustin-Louis Cauchy Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy ( , , ; ; 21 August 1789 – 23 May 1857) was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist. He was one of the first to rigorously state and prove the key theorems of calculus (thereby creating real a ...

. In 1857, von Seidel contributed to the field of

optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of optical instruments, instruments that use or Photodetector, detect it. Optics usually describes t ...

when he 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 Christian Hugo Eduard Study ( ; 23 March 1862 – 6 January 1930) was a German mathematician known for work on invariant theory of ternary forms (1889) and for the study of spherical trigonometry. He is also known for contributions to space geome ...

and Hermann Wiener. The

Gauss–Seidel method In numerical linear algebra, the Gauss–Seidel method, also known as the Liebmann method or the method of successive displacement, is an iterative method used to solve a system of linear equations. It is named after the German mathematicians Ca ...

is a useful numerical iterative method for solving linear systems.

References

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Biography
University of St. Andrews 1821 births 1896 deaths 19th-century German mathematicians {{Germany-mathematician-stub

See also

References

External links