Person: Heine, Heinrich Eduard

Eduard Heine is best remembered for the Heine-Borel Theorem. He was responsible for the introduction of the idea of uniform continuity.

After his Abitur in the autumn 1838, Heine entered the University of Berlin.
After three semesters at Göttingen, Heine returned to the University of Berlin where he where he was taught by Dirichlet.
Heine submitted his thesis De aequationibus nonnullis differentialibus Ⓣ(Some differential equations) and was awarded the degree on 30 April 1842.
On 20 July 1844 Heine habilitated at the University of Bonn where he was appointed as a privatdozent.
On 6 September 1856 Heine was promoted to ordinary professor at Halle.
Before arriving at Halle, Heine published on partial differential equations and during his first few years teaching at Halle he wrote papers on the theory of heat, summation of series, continued fractions and elliptic functions.
At Halle, Heine taught a variety of courses such as: potential theory and its applications, number theory, Fourier series, trigonometric series, mechanics, and the theory of heat.
Heine worked on Legendre polynomials, Lamé functions and Bessel functions.
Heine also formulated the concept of uniform continuity.
The first proof of this theorem was given by Dirichlet in his lectures of 1862 (published 1904) before Heine proved it in 1872.
Dugac shows that Dirichlet used the idea of a covering and a finite subcovering more explicitly than Heine.

Born 16 March 1821, Berlin, Germany. Died 21 October 1881, Halle, Germany.

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Analysis, Astronomy, Origin Germany

Theorems: 1

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O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive