german number theorist (1877–1938), author of the classic Handbuch der Lehre von der Verteilung der Primzahlen and of a famously austere lecturing style — definitions, theorem, proof, nothing else
in 1895, as a student thinking about chess tournaments, he proposed ranking players by the eigenvector of the results matrix — the first appearance of eigenvector ranking, a century before pagerank. the mathematics he reached for became perron-frobenius-theorem