KRONECKER, LEOPOLD

KRONECKER, LEOPOLD (1823–1891), German mathematician. He was born in Liegnitz, brother of hugo kronecker . Following the death of his uncle, a successful banker, Kronecker entered the business world. He prospered and was able to retire after eight years and devote the remainder of his life to the study of mathematics. In 1883 he was appointed professor at Berlin. Kronecker insisted that the concept of "continuity" was meaningless and mathematics can only discuss discrete quantities. He is reputed to have said "God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man." Despite his friendship with the famous mathematician K.T.W. Weierstrass, Kronecker attacked him for including the concept of irrationals in his development of analysis. He became imbued with enthusiasm for Christian theology and was converted to Christianity in the last year of his life. Kronecker's main contributions were in number theory, elliptic functions, and algebraic numbers. His theory of algebraic magnitudes made a fundamental contribution to the modern theory of commutative fields. Kronecker's entire work was edited by K. Hensel in five volumes (1895–1931). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (1937), 519–37. (Barry Spain)