This early work by David Hilbert was originally published in the early
20th century and we are now republishing it with a brand new
introductory biography. David Hilbert was born on the 23rd January 1862,
in a Province of Prussia. Hilbert is recognised as one of the most
influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. He discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental
ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization
of geometry. He also formulated the theory of Hilbert spaces, one of the
foundations of functional analysis.