Rudolf Lipschitz - Biography

Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz (14 May 1832 – 7 October 1903) was a German mathematician and professor at the University of Bonn from 1864. Peter Gustav Dirichlet was his teacher. He supervised the early work of Felix Klein.

While Lipschitz gave his name to the Lipschitz continuity condition, he worked in a broad range of areas. These included number theory, algebras with involution, mathematical analysis, differential geometry and classical mechanics.

He wrote: Lehrbuch der Analysis (two volumes, Bonn 1877, 1880); Wissenschaft und Staat (Bonn, 1874); Untersuchungen über die Summen von Quadraten (Bonn, 1886); Bedeutung der theoretischen Mechanik (Berlin, 1876).

Lipschitz, a forgotten pioneer

Lipschitz discovered Clifford algebras in 1880 , two years after William K. Clifford (1845–1879) and independently of him, and he was the first to use them in the study of orthogonal transformations. Up to 1950 people mentioned “Clifford-Lipschitz numbers” when they referred to this discovery of Lipschitz. Yet Lipschitz’s name suddenly disappeared from the publications involving Clifford algebras; for instance Claude Chevalley (1909–1984) gave the name “Clifford group” to an object that is never mentioned in Clifford’s works, but stems from Lipschitz’s. Pertti Lounesto (1945–2002) contributed greatly to recalling the importance of Lipschitz’s role.

<references/>

Books

External links

• (digitalized document, provided without fee by Göttingen Digitalization Project, in German)