Christoph Gudermann

Christoph Gudermann (25 March 1798 to 25 September 1852) was a German mathematician noted for introducing the Gudermannian function and the concept of uniform convergence, and for being the teacher of Karl Weierstrass, who was greatly influenced by Gudermann's 1839 to 1840 course on elliptic functions, the first such course taught in any institute. Born in Vienenburg, the son of a school teacher, he studied at the University of Göttingen and became a teacher himself, first at Kleve and then at a school in Münster. He introduced uniform convergence in an 1838 paper on elliptic functions but observed it only informally, neither formalizing it nor using it in his proofs; Weierstrass elaborated and applied it. His research on spherical geometry and special functions focused on particular cases, so he did not receive the credit given to those who published more general works.