Otto Stolz

Otto Stolz (1842 to 1905) was an Austrian mathematician born in Hall in Tirol who spent almost his whole career at the University of Innsbruck. After studying at Innsbruck and Vienna and gaining a doctorate in 1864 on a geometrical thesis, he spent 1869 to 1871 in Germany, where lectures by Weierstrass, Kummer, Kronecker, Klein and Clebsch turned his attention from geometry toward analysis. He became a professor at Innsbruck in 1872 and held the ordinary chair from 1876, refusing calls to Vienna. His work covers convergence of series, indeterminate ratios, integration and infinitesimals, and he coined the name Archimedes axiom in 1882. His textbooks on general arithmetic and on the infinitesimal calculus became classics, and his name survives in the Stolz-Cesaro theorem.