"Help! I was hunting in the woods with my friend, and he suddenly dropped dead for no reason! Oh my God, I'm freaking out!!"
"Calm down, sir, we'll get you through this. The first thing we need to do is make sure that your friend really is dead."
"All right, hold on a second."
BLAM!
"Okay, now what?"
Karl WeierstrassBorn 31 Oct 1815; died 19 Feb 1897 at age 81. Karl (Theodor Wilhelm) Weierstrass was a German mathematician who is known as the "father of modern analysis" for his rigour in analysis led to the modern theory of functions, and considered one of the greatest mathematics teachers of all-time. He was doing mathematical research while a secondary school teacher, when in 1854, he published a paper on Abelian functions in the famous Crelle Journal. The paper so impressed the mathematical community that he shortly received an honorary doctorate and by 1856, he had a University appointment in Berlin. In 1871, he demonstrated that there exist continuous functions in an interval which have no derivatives nowhere in the interval. He also did outstanding work on complex variables.« |
