Stieltjes, Thomas Jan

Thomas Jan Stieltjes, (born 1856, Zwolle, Netherlands—died 1894, Toulouse, France), Dutch-born French mathematician who made notable contributions to the theory of infinite series. He is remembered as “the father of the analytic theory of continued fractions.”

Stieltjes was the son of a civil engineer and enrolled in 1873 at the École Polytechnique in Delft. However, he was more interested in reading mathematical monographs in the school’s library than in attending classes and failed his exams that year, as well as subsequent exams in 1875 and 1876. In 1877 his father got him a position as an assistant at the Leiden Observatory. After six years of work at the observatory, during which he continued his mathematical research and married a woman who encouraged him in this professional direction, Stieltjes accepted a position at the University of Groningen. A royal decree was issued in 1884, however, rescinding the offer because of his lack of a formal degree. Later that year an honorary degree in mathematics and astronomy was conferred upon him by the State University of Leiden. He moved to Paris in 1885, received a doctorate there in the following year, and became a professor of mathematics at the University of Toulouse, where he remained for the rest of his life.

In addition to his studies of divergent and conditionally convergent infinite series, he made advances in the theory of the Riemann zeta function, in number theory, and in the theory of spherical harmonics (see harmonic analysis). He also proposed an important generalization of the integral for studying continued fractions. Combined with Bernhard Riemann’s definition and now known as the Riemann-Stieltjes integral, it is widely used for applications in physics. His work on continued fractions was the first general treatment of the subject as a part of complex analysis and laid the groundwork for the development of Hilbert spaces—infinite-dimensional vector spaces, developed by the German mathematician David Hilbert, that were later used in formulating quantum mechanics.