Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805 59) may be considered the father of modern number theory. He studied in Paris, coming under the influence of mathematicians like Fourier and Legendre, and then taught at Berlin and Gottingen universities, where he was the successor to Gauss. This book contains lectures on number theory given by Dirichlet in 1856 7. They include his famous proofs of the class number theorem for binary quadratic forms and the existence of an infinity of primes in every appropriate arithmetical progression. The material was first published in 1863 by Richard Dedekind (1831...

The great nineteenth-century mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805 59) studied in Paris, coming under the influence of scholars including Fourier and Legendre. He then taught at Berlin and Gottingen universities, where he was the successor to Gauss and mentor to Riemann and Dedekind. His achievements include the first satisfactory proof of the convergence of Fourier series under appropriate conditions, and the theorem on primes in arithmetic progression which was, at the same time, the foundation of analytic number theory and one of its greatest achievements. He also did...

The great nineteenth-century mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805 59) studied in Paris, coming under the influence of scholars including Fourier and Legendre. He then taught at Berlin and Gottingen universities, where he was the successor to Gauss and mentor to Riemann and Dedekind. His achievements include the first satisfactory proof of the convergence of Fourier series under appropriate conditions, and the theorem on primes in arithmetic progression which was, at the same time, the foundation of analytic number theory and one of its greatest achievements. He also did...