Perron, Oskar, 1880-1975

Oskar Perron (7 May 1880 – 22 February 1975) was a German mathematician. He was a professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1914 to 1922 and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1922 to 1951. He made numerous contributions to differential equations and partial differential equations, including the Perron method to solve the Dirichlet problem for elliptic partial differential equations. He wrote an encyclopedic book on continued fractions Die Lehre von den Kettenbrüchen. He introduced Perron's paradox to illustrate the danger of assuming that the solution of an optimization problem exists: Let N be the largest positive integer. If N > 1, then N2 > N, contradicting the definition of N. Hence N = 1.