Leo Koenigsberger

Leo Koenigsberger, also written Königsberger, was a German mathematician born in Posen, then in Prussia and now Poznan in Poland, on 15 October 1837, who died in Heidelberg on 15 December 1921. A pupil of Karl Weierstrass at the University of Berlin, where his boyhood tutor Lazarus Fuchs also became a lifelong friend, he took his doctorate in 1860 and held posts at Greifswald, Heidelberg, Dresden and Vienna before returning to Heidelberg in 1884, where he taught until he retired in 1914. His research concerned elliptic functions and differential equations, and he was the first to treat not just one differential equation but an entire system of such equations in complex variables. His textbooks on elliptic functions, hyperelliptic integrals and differential equations were widely used, and he is also known for his two volume biography of Helmholtz of 1902 and his biographical volume on Jacobi of 1904.