Ferdinand Rudio

Ferdinand Rudio (born 2 August 1856 in Wiesbaden, died 21 June 1929 in Zurich) was a German and Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics.

His initial courses in Zurich were in civil engineering, but in his second year (under the influence of Karl Geiser) he switched to mathematics and physics.

Finishing at Zurich in 1877, he went on to graduate studies at the University of Berlin from 1877 to 1880, earning his Ph.D. under the joint supervision of Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass.

His thesis research concerned the use of differential equations to characterize surface by the properties of their sets of centers of curvature,[1] and he was also known for the first proof of convergence of Viète's infinite product for π.

[1] He gave a talk Mitteilungen über die Eulerausgabe (news about the Euler edition) at the fifth ICM in Cambridge, England in August 1912.