Eduard Heine
Encyclopedia
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
mathematician
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
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Heine became known for results on special functions and in real analysis
Real analysis
Real analysis, is a branch of mathematical analysis dealing with the set of real numbers and functions of a real variable. In particular, it deals with the analytic properties of real functions and sequences, including convergence and limits of sequences of real numbers, the calculus of the real...
. In particular, he authored an important treatise on spherical harmonics
Spherical harmonics
In mathematics, spherical harmonics are the angular portion of a set of solutions to Laplace's equation. Represented in a system of spherical coordinates, Laplace's spherical harmonics Y_\ell^m are a specific set of spherical harmonics that forms an orthogonal system, first introduced by Pierre...
and Legendre functions (Handbuch der Kugelfunctionen). He also investigated basic hypergeometric series
Basic hypergeometric series
In mathematics, Heine's basic hypergeometric series, or hypergeometric q-series, are q-analog generalizations of generalized hypergeometric series, and are in turn generalized by elliptic hypergeometric series....
. He introduced the Mehler–Heine formula
Mehler–Heine formula
In mathematics, the Mehler–Heine formula introduced by and describes the asymptotic behavior of the Legendre polynomials as the index tends to infinity, near the edges of the support of the weight. There are generalizations to other classical orthogonal polynomials, which are also called the...
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Works by Heinrich Eduard Heine
- De aequationibus nonnullis differentialibus (Berlin, 1842)
- Handbuch der Kugelfunctionen (G. Reimer, Berlin, 1861)
- Handbuch der Kugelfunctionen, Theorie und Anwendungen (Volume 1) (2nd ed., G. Reimer, Berlin, 1878)
- Handbuch der Kugelfunctionen, Theorie und Anwendungen (Volume 2) (2nd ed., G. Reimer, Berlin, 1881)
See also
- Heine-Borel theorem
- Heine-Cantor theorem
- Heine definition of continuity
- Heine's Reciprocal Square Root Identity