Philipp Ludwig von Seidel

Philipp Ludwig von Seidel was a German mathematician, born in Zweibrücken in 1821 and died in Munich in 1896, the son of Julie Reinhold and Justus Christian Felix Seidel. Imre Lakatos credits him with discovering in 1847 the crucial analytic concept of uniform convergence, while he was analysing an incorrect proof put forward earlier by Augustin-Louis Cauchy. In 1857 he contributed to optics when he decomposed the first order monochromatic aberrations into five constituent aberrations, now commonly called the five Seidel aberrations. The lunar crater Seidel is named after him, his doctoral students include Eduard Study and Hermann Wiener, and the Gauss-Seidel method, a numerical iterative method for solving linear systems, carries his name.