Charles Cellérier

Charles Cellérier (1818–1889) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist, born and died in Geneva, where he devoted most of his career to teaching and research in various branches of mathematics. Although little known during his lifetime—because he deliberately kept a low profile—and after his death, his work is of notable historical interest. He is particularly recognised for having constructed, independently of Karl Weierstrass and probably before him, an example of a continuous nowhere differentiable function, a result that remained in his unpublished papers until his death and was published only in 1890 by Charles-Ange Laisant. This discovery illustrates the type of pathological functions that would overturn classical intuitions about analysis in the 19th century. He published a number of articles as well as a course in mechanics.