Karl Weierstraß

Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstraß (31 October 1815 - 19 February 1897) was a German mathematician. Most of his work is about using logic as a thorough foundation of analysis. He mainly used power series for this. He also provided foundations for the theory of elliptic functions, differential geometry and the calculus of variations. The Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem is named in his honour: according to the theorem, every bounded sequence of real numbers has at least one limit point. He criticised earlier mathematicians for using assumptions too often, and being too vague in their definitions.