Paul du Bois-Reymond

Who was Paul du Bois-Reymond?

Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond was a German mathematician who was born in Berlin and died in Freiburg. He was the brother of Emil du Bois-Reymond.

His thesis was concerned with the mechanical equilibrium of fluids. He worked on the theory of functions and in mathematical physics. His interests included Sturm–Liouville theory, integral equations, variational calculus, and Fourier series. In this latter field, he was able in 1873 to construct a continuous function whose Fourier series is not convergent. His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost everywhere.

Du Bois-Reymond also established that a trigonometric series that converges to a continuous function at every point is the Fourier series of this function.