People with a strong Berlin connection - W
W
- Karl Weierstrass
In 1834, Weierstrass had entered Bonn University to studey law, finance and economics, because his father had a career
in the Prussian Administartion planned for him, to which he rspsonded by apparently taking no interest in thes
subjects and failing the exams.
In 1839, he entered the Academy at Münster, training to be a secondary school teacher, an occupation he took up
from 1841.
He published papers on Mathematics, however, which were of such high quality that he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Königsberg University, in 1854, after which he applied for the vacancy of Professor at Breslau University, left vacant by the departure of Kummer for Berlin. However it appears that Kummer himself contrived for Weierstrass to go to Berlin, although it appears that immediately he went to neither place.
On 14 June 1856 he did actually go to the city of Berlin when he accepted a post at the Technical Hochschule (as it is now known) in Berlin. It was later in the year that he was offered a post as Professor at Berlin University itself, but he was not able to formally occupy this post for a few years because he had accepted the job at the Technical Hochschule.
His main research topic was elliptic functions. He was a close friend of Kronecker, but they fell out in 1877 over differing attitudes to the work of Cantor, such that Weierstrass contemplated leaving Berlin at one point.
His work included :-
- elliptic functions (as already mentioned)
- application of Fourier Series and integrals to theoretical physics.
- theory of analytic functions
- integral calculus - he discovered a function which, although continuous, has no derivative at any point.
- devising tests for the convergence of series
He also gave private lessons to Sofia Kovalevskaya who, as a woman, was not allowed entry to the University.
- Kurt Weill attended Berlin Hochschule für Musik in 1918.
- Horst Wessel Shot in 1930. Took six weeks to die, during which time Goebbel's propaganda machine went into full flow.At his funeral, the mourners were attacked with stones by socialists. Goebbels published a song written by Wessel - it became a party anthem and then, later, the German National Anthem.
