Leopold Gegenbauer

Leopold Gegenbauer (1849 to 1903) was an Austrian mathematician best remembered for the family of orthogonal polynomials that carry his name. Born in Asperhofen in Lower Austria, he studied at the University of Vienna and then spent two years in Berlin attending lectures by Weierstrass, Kronecker, Kummer and Helmholtz, taking his doctorate in 1875 with work on the polynomials, including their addition formula. He held posts at Czernowitz, Innsbruck and finally Vienna, where he filled the chair left vacant by the death of his former teacher Joseph Petzval and taught students such as Josip Plemelj and James Pierpont. He worked in number theory, function theory and integration and was chiefly an algebraist, yet his name survives in Gegenbauer polynomials, functions, transforms and the Gegenbauer addition theorem. He also helped to establish actuarial studies at the University of Vienna and served for a time as a state school inspector.