Otto Hölder

Who was Otto Hölder?

Otto Ludwig Hölder was a German mathematician born in Stuttgart.

Hölder first studied at the Polytechnikum and then in 1877 went to Berlin where he was a student of Leopold Kronecker, Karl Weierstraß, and Ernst Kummer.

He is famous for many things including: Hölder's inequality, the Jordan–Hölder theorem, the theorem stating that every linearly ordered group that satisfies an Archimedean property is isomorphic to a subgroup of the additive group of real numbers, the classification of simple groups of order up to 200, the anomalous outer automorphisms of the symmetric group S6 and Hölder's theorem which implies that the Gamma function satisfies no algebraic differential equation. Another important notion related to his name is the Hölder condition which is used in many areas of analysis, including the theories of partial differential equations and function spaces.

In 1877, he entered the University of Berlin and took his doctorate from the University of Tübingen in 1882. The title of his doctoral thesis was "Beiträge zur Potentialtheorie". He worked at the University of Leipzig from 1899 until his retirement.