An unpublished paper ‘Über einige durch unendliche Reihen definirte Functionen eines complexen Argumentes’ by Adolf Hurwitz

In 1903, Epstein published his proof of meromorphic continuation and a functional equation for Dirichlet series associated with quadratic forms, now called Epstein zeta-functions. However, already in 1889 (or even earlier) Hurwitz was aware of these results as his mathematical diaries and some unpublished notes (in an almost final form) found in his estate at the ETH Zurich show. In this article we present and analyze Hurwitz's notes and compare his reasoning with Epstein's paper in detail.