The development of the concept of uniform convergence in Karl Weierstrass’s lectures and publications between 1861 and 1886

Abstract

The history of uniform convergence is typically focused on the contributions of Cauchy, Seidel, Stokes, and Björling. While the mathematical contributions of these individuals to the concept of uniform convergence have been much discussed, Weierstrass is considered to be the actual inventor of today’s concept. This view is often based on his well-known article from 1841. However, Weierstrass’s works on a rigorous foundation of analytic and elliptic functions date primarily from his lecture courses at the University of Berlin up to the mid-1880s. For the history of uniform convergence, these lectures open up an independent branch of development that is disconnected from the approaches of the previously mentioned authors; to my knowledge, Weierstraß never explicitly referred to Cauchy’s continuity theorem (1821 or 1853) or to Seidel’s or Stokes’s contributions (1847). In the present article, Weierstrass’s contributions to the development of uniform convergence will be discussed, mainly based on lecture notes made by Weierstrass’s students between 1861 and the mid-1880s. The emphasis is on the notation and the mathematical rigor of the introductions to the concept, leading to the proposal to re-date the famous 1841 article and thus Weierstrass’s first introduction of uniform convergence.