Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz

1832 - 1903 Rudolf Lipschitz was born in 1832 into a wealthy family in the German village of Bonkein, near Konigsberg, which today is the Russian city of Kaliningrad. Lipschitz wanted to become a professor of mathematics and began his studies at a young age. He first entered the University of Konigsberg, where his teacher was Franz Neumann. At that time it was the custom to study at two different universities. Following this custom, Lipschitz enrolled in the …

…contributed. He made important and productive investigations into number theory, Bessel’s functions, the Fourier series, and analytical mechanics. His work in mechanical interpretation of Riemann’s differential geometry helped pave the way towards Einstein’s special theory of relativity. He is most remembered for the “Lipschitz condition”, an inequality that guarantees a unique solution to the differential equation y ‘ = f ( x y ). Rudolf Lipschitz died on October 7, 1903 in Bonn, Germany at the age of 71.