Charles Hermite
Contribution to mathematics

An inspiring teacher, Hermite strove to cultivate admiration for simple beauty and discourage rigorous minutiae. His correspondence with Thomas Stieltjes testifies to the great aid he gave those beginning scientific life. His published courses of lectures have exercised a great influence. His important original contributions to pure mathematics, published in the major mathematical journals of the world, dealt chiefly with Abelian and elliptic functions and the theory of numbers.

In 1858, Hermite showed that equations of the fifth degree could be solved by elliptic functions. In 1873, he proved that e, the base of the natural system of logarithms, is transcendental. Techniques similar to those used in Hermite's proof of e ' s transcendence were used by Ferdinand von Lindemann in 1882 to show that π is transcendental.
punctuation:no_comma, startend:quotation