Weierstrass, Karl Theodor Wilhelm 1815-97
German mathematician

Born in Ostenfelde and educated at the universities of Bonn and M�nster, he became professor at Berlin University in 1856. He became famous for his lectures, in which he gave a systematic account of analysis with previously unknown rigour, basing complex function theory on power series in contrast to the approach of Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Bernhard Riemann. He made important advances in the theory of elliptic and Abelian functions, constructed the first accepted example of a continuous but nowhere-differentiable function, and showed that every continuous function could be uniformly approximated by polynomials. Many of his most profound ideas grew out of his attempts to present a completely systematic, self-contained account of contemporary mathematics.