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3 unusual facts about Emil du Bois-Reymond


Emil du Bois-Reymond

He made Du Bois-Reymond in 1840 his assistant in physiology, and as a starting-point for an inquiry put into his hands the essay which the Italian Carlo Matteucci, had just published on the electric phenomena of animals.

Ignoramus et ignorabimus

Emil du Bois-Reymond used ignoramus et ignorabimus in discussing what he called seven "world riddles", in a famous 1880 speech before the Berlin Academy of Sciences.

It was given credibility by Emil du Bois-Reymond, a German physiologist, in his Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens ("On the limits of our understanding of nature") of 1872.


Carleson's theorem

This was disproved by Paul du Bois-Reymond, who showed in 1876 that there is a continuous function whose Fourier series diverges at one point.

Paul du Bois-Reymond

His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost everywhere.

Reymond de Montmorency

Born in Gonda, in India, de Montmorency was the son of Major Reymond Hervey de Montmorency and Marion Ellen Coles.

Uniform convergence

Under the influence of Weierstrass and Bernhard Riemann this concept and related questions were intensely studied at the end of the 19th century by Hermann Hankel, Paul du Bois-Reymond, Ulisse Dini, Cesare Arzelà and others.


see also