Paul David Gustav Du Bois-Reymond

---

Born: 2 Dec 1831 in Berlin, Germany
Died: 7 April 1889 in Freiburg, Germany

 

Paul du Bois-Reymond was a brother of the famous physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond and studied at Berlin and then medicine at Zurich. Moving to Königsberg he was influenced by Franz Neumann to change to mathematics. After a doctorate from Berlin he held chairs in Heidelberg, Freiburg and Tübingen where he succeeded Hankel. Finally he was appointed to a chair in Berlin.

His work is almost exclusively on calculus, in particular differential equations and functions of a real variable. He generalised Monge's idea of the characteristic of a partial differential equation from 2nd order equations to nth order equations. This work formed a basis of what Lie was to generalise later.

In 1873 he gave a continuous function with divergent Fourier series at any point solving a major problem. The term 'integral equation' is due to Du Bois-Reymond.