Paul Wolfskehl

His elder brother, the jurist Wilhelm Otto Wolfskehl, took over the family bank after the death of his father.

[2][3][4] At about this time, he began to suffer from multiple sclerosis, which eventually forced him to pursue another career.

The most romantic is that he was spurned by a young lady and decided to commit suicide, but was distracted by what he thought was an error in a paper by Ernst Kummer, who had detected a flaw in Augustin Cauchy's attempted proof of Fermat's famous problem.

This story was traced by Philip Davis and William Chinn in their 1969 book 3.1416 and All That to renowned mathematician Alexander Ostrowski, who supposedly heard it from another, unidentified source.

Yet another story, told in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman, tells that Wolfskehl actually missed his supposed suicide time because he was in the library studying the Theorem.