Inspired by the work of his mentor in Paris, Dirichlet published in 1829 a famous memoir giving the conditions, showing for which functions the convergence of the Fourier series holds. Before Dirichlet's solution, not only Fourier, but also Poisson and Cauchy had tried unsuccessfully to find a rigorous proof of convergence. The memoir pointed out Cauchy's mistake and introduced Dirichlet's test for the convergence of series. It also introduced the Dirichlet function as an example that not any function is integrable (the definite integral was still a developing topic at the time) and, in the proof of the theorem for the Fourier series, introduced the Dirichlet kernel and the Dirichlet integral.[8]
Dirichlet also studied the first boundary value problem, for the Laplace equation, proving the unicity of the solution; this type of problem in the theory of partial differential equations was later named the Dirichlet problem after him.[6] In the proof he notably used the principle that the solution is the function that minimizes the so-called Dirichlet energy. Riemann later named this approach the Dirichlet principle, although he knew it had also been used by Gauss and by Lord Kelvin.[1]