Jan Cornelis Kluyver

Jan Cornelis Kluyver, born Kluijver, who lived from 2 May 1860 to 31 December 1932, was a Dutch mathematician and professor at Leiden University. He trained as a civil engineer at the Polytechnic School in Delft, graduating in 1881, taught mathematics at secondary schools in Breda and Amsterdam, and in 1892 was appointed professor of mathematics at Leiden. With Diederik Korteweg and Pieter Hendrik Schoute he modernized mathematics teaching in the Netherlands, and he was rector magnificus of Leiden in 1909 and 1910 and an editor of the Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde. He taught algebra, calculus, function theory and probability and also worked on differential geometry and number theory. He gave formulas for the Euler-Mascheroni constant and for the Stieltjes constants in terms of Bernoulli polynomials, and in 1905 solved Karl Pearson's random walk problem. He received an honorary doctorate from Groningen in 1896, joined the Royal Netherlands Academy in 1897 and retired in 1930. Hendrik Kloosterman wrote his doctoral thesis under him.