Deaths on January 14

Charles Hermite, French mathematician and theorist (b. 1822)

Charles Hermite (French pronunciation: ​[ʃaʁl ɛʁˈmit]) FRS FRSE MIAS (24 December 1822 – 14 January 1901) was a French mathematician who did research concerning number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra.

Hermite polynomials, Hermite interpolation, Hermite normal form, Hermitian operators, and cubic Hermite splines are named in his honor. One of his students was Henri Poincaré.

He was the first to prove that e, the base of natural logarithms, is a transcendental number. His methods were used later by Ferdinand von Lindemann to prove that π is transcendental.

In a letter to Thomas Joannes Stieltjes, Hermite once remarked about Weierstrass functions, "I turn with terror and horror from this lamentable scourge of continuous functions with no derivatives."The Hermite crater near the Moon's north pole is named in his honor.