◀ ▲ ▶History / 19th-century / Person: Lipschitz, Rudolf Otto Sigismund
Person: Lipschitz, Rudolf Otto Sigismund
Rudolf Lipschitz is remembered for the "Lipschitz condition", an inequality that guarantees a unique solution to the differential equation y' = f (x, y).
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Following the custom of that time to study at different universities, Lipschitz went from Königsberg to Berlin where he studied under Dirichlet.
- This was not a particularly easy time for Lipschitz whose health was rather poor and caused him to take a year away from his studies to recover.
- There was no immediate university teaching post for Lipschitz who spent four years teaching at the Gymnasium in Königsberg and at the Gymnasium in Elbing.
- In 1857, however, Lipschitz became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin.
- During his two years in Breslau, Lipschitz wrote two not very important papers.
- The University of Bonn was where Lipschitz spent the rest of his career.
- Lipschitz was quite happy at Bonn, however, and he turned down the offer from Göttingen.
- He was supervised by Plücker, and examined by Lipschitz.
- Perhaps if Klein had still been in Göttingen when Lipschitz was offered the chair there, he may have been more inclined to accept.
- Lipschitz's work on the Hamilton-Jacobi method for integrating the equations of motion of a general dynamical system led to important applications in celestial mechanics.
- Lipschitz rediscovered Clifford algebras and was the first to apply them to represent rotations of Euclidean spaces, thus introducing the spin groups Spin(nnn).
Born 14 May 1832, Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Died 7 October 1903, Bonn, Germany.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Russia
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
