Home > Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet

His family hailed from the town of Richelet in Belgium, from which his surname "Lejeune Dirichlet" ("le jeune de Richelet" = "the young chap from Richelet") was derived, and that was where his grandfather lived.

Dirichlet was born in Düren , where his father was the postmaster. He was educated in Germany, and then France, where he learnt from many of the most renowned mathematicians of the day. His first paper was on Fermat's Last Theorem. This was a famous conjecture (now proven) that stated that for n > 2, the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no solutions, apart from the trivial ones in which x, y, or z is zero. He produced a partial proof for the case n = 5, which was completed by Adrien-Marie Legendre, who was one of the referees. Dirichlet also completed his own proof almost at the same time; he later also produced a full proof for the case n = 14.

He married Rebecca Mendelssohn , who came from a distinguished Jewish family, being a granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and a sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

After his death, Dirichlet's lectures and other results in number theoryTraditionally, number theory is that branch of pure mathematics concerned with the properties of integers and contains many open problems that are easily understood even by non-mathematicians. More generally, the field has come to be concerned with a wide were collected, edited and published by his friend and fellow mathematician Richard DedekindJulius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind ( October 6, 1831 February 12, 1916) was a German mathematician and Ernst Eduard Kummer's closest follower in arithmetic. Dedekind was born in Braunschweig Brunswick the youngest of four children of Julius Levin Ulrich Dede under the title Vorlesungen über ZahlentheorieVorlesungen uber Zahlentheorie Lectures on Number Theory is a textbook of number theory written by German mathematicians P. Dirichlet and Richard Dedekind, and published in 1863. Based on Dirichlet's number theory course at the University of Gottingen, th (Lectures on Number Theory).

1 See also

• Dirichlet's theorem ( number theoryTraditionally, number theory is that branch of pure mathematics concerned with the properties of integers and contains many open problems that are easily understood even by non-mathematicians. More generally, the field has come to be concerned with a wide, 1835Events January 1 Ole Pedersen Hoiland breaks into the Bank of Norway and steals 64. 000 dalers January 7 HMS Beagle anchors off the Chonos Archipelago. January 30 Unsuccessful assassination attempt against President Andrew Jackson in the United States Cap)
• Dirichlet characterIn number theory, a Dirichlet character is a function χ from the positive integers to the complex numbers which has the following properties: There exists a positive integer k such that χ n χ n + k for all n''. This means that the character iss ( number theoryTraditionally, number theory is that branch of pure mathematics concerned with the properties of integers and contains many open problems that are easily understood even by non-mathematicians. More generally, the field has come to be concerned with a wide, 1831)
• Dirichlet convolution ( number theory)
• Dirichlet kernel ( functional analysis, Fourier series)
• Dirichlet series
• Dirichlet tessellation
• Dirichlet boundary condition
• Dirichlet function
• Pigeonhole principle