Eduard Heine

Heinrich Eduard Heine ( born March 18, 1821 in Berlin, † October 21, 1881 in Halle ( Saale) ) was a German mathematician.

Heine attended schools in Berlin and studied in Göttingen, Berlin and Königsberg mathematics (as well as physics, chemistry, mineralogy, philosophy and archeology). In 1842 he received his doctorate in Berlin. In his thesis he introduced the spherical functions of the second kind. After that he was in Bonn, where he habilitated in 1844 and 1848 became a professor, and from 1856 professor at Halle. He worked primarily in the areas of potential theory, function theory and partial differential equations. Here he worked on spherical harmonics, Legendre polynomials, Laméschen functions, Bessel functions, summation of infinite series, continued fractions and elliptic functions.

His grave is located on the Halle Stadtgottesacker.

Named after him is the set of Heine on continuous functions, which says that every continuous function on a compact domain is uniformly continuous. The Borel covering theorem (after Emile Borel ) is often named after Heine and Borel. The works of Heine Fourier series were a starting point for Georg Cantor's investigations which led to the development of set theory.

Eduard Heine's sister Albertine was with Paul Mendelssohn -Bartholdy, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy 's brother, married. The now almost forgotten writer Anselma Heine was Eduard Heine's daughter.

Writings

• Handbook of spherical harmonics, Berlin, Reimer 1861, 2nd edition in two volumes in 1878, 1881, reprint 1961