Mathwar/Personlist/Perron Oskar
Oskar Perron
(* May 7th 1880 in Frankenthal, † February 22nd 1975 in Munich)
Life
Oskar Perron studied classics at school and, despite his father wishing him to continue the family business, he studied mathematics in his spare time. In 1898 Perron entered the University of Munich and, in keeping with the custom of the time to spend semesters at different universities, he also studied at the universities of Berlin, Tübingen and Göttingen.
His work in analysis is certainly remembered through the Perron integral. However he also worked on differential equations, matrices and other topics in algebra, continued fractions, geometry and number theory.
Perron published a number of important texts. In addition to the work on continued fractions mentioned above, which in fact ran to three editions the last being a two volume version in 1954/57, he published an important text on irrational numbers in 1921. This text was designed to require only school level mathematics as a prerequisite and the topic was skilfully developed in a beautiful self-contained way. Again this was a text which ran to several editions and Perron revised the text in 1960 when he was aged 80.