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Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; german: Gauß ; la, Carolus Fridericus Gauss; 30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes referred to as the ''Princeps mathematicorum'' () and "the greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had an exceptional influence in many fields of mathematics and science, and he is ranked among history's most influential mathematicians. Also available at Retrieved 23 February 2014. Comprehensive biographical article. Biography Early years Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Brunswick (Braunschweig), in the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (now part of Lower Saxony, Germany), to poor, working-class parents. His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension (which occurs 39 days after Easter). Ga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christian Albrecht Jensen
Christian Albrecht Jensen (26 June 1792 – 13 July 1870) was a Danish portrait painter who was active during the Golden Age of Danish Painting in the first half of the 19th century. Painting more than 400 portraits over the course of his career, he depicted most of the leading figures of the Danish Golden Age, including the writer Hans Christian Andersen, the painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted and the theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig. Although Jensen experienced considerable commercial success, he received little official appreciation from the artistic establishment of his day. In particular, the art historian and critic Niels Lauritz Høyen criticized his style, finding his paintings 'unfinished'. Early life and education Jensen was born at Bredstedt in Nordfriesland. From 1810 to 1816, he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen where he studied under Christian August Lorentze ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copley Medal
The Copley Medal is an award given by the Royal Society, for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science". It alternates between the physical sciences or mathematics and the biological sciences. Given every year, the medal is the oldest Royal Society medal awarded and the oldest surviving scientific award in the world, having first been given in 1731 to Stephen Gray (scientist), Stephen Gray, for "his new Electrical Experiments: – as an encouragement to him for the readiness he has always shown in obliging the Society with his discoveries and improvements in this part of Natural Knowledge". __TOC__ History The medal was created following a donation of Pound sterling, £100 to be used for carrying out experiments by Sir Godfrey Copley, 2nd Baronet, Sir Godfrey Copley, for which the interest on the amount was used for several years. The conditions for the medal have been changed several times; in 1736, it was suggested that "a medal or other honorary prize s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gustav Kirchhoff
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (; 12 March 1824 – 17 October 1887) was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term black-body radiation in 1862. Several different sets of concepts are named "Kirchhoff's laws" after him, concerning such diverse subjects as black-body radiation and spectroscopy, electrical circuits, and thermochemistry. The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after him and his colleague, Robert Bunsen. Life and work Gustav Kirchhoff was born on 12 March 1824 in Königsberg, Prussia, the son of Friedrich Kirchhoff, a lawyer, and Johanna Henriette Wittke. His family were Lutherans in the Evangelical Church of Prussia. He graduated from the Albertus University of Königsberg in 1847 where he attended the mathematico-physical seminar directed by Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, Franz Ernst Neumann and Fried ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt
Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt (4 August 1807 – 15 February 1851) was a German astronomer, mathematician, and physicist of Jewish descent who was a professor of astronomy at the University of Göttingen. He is also known as Benjamin Goldschmidt, C. W. B. Goldschmidt, Carl Goldschmidt, and Karl Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt, who suffered from an enlargement of the heart, died in his sleep and was found on the morning of 15 February 1851. Mathematical works A student of Carl Friedrich Gauss and an assistant to Gauss at the university observatory, Goldschmidt frequently collaborated with Gauss on various mathematical and scientific works. Goldschmidt was in turn a professor of Gauss's protégé Bernhard Riemann. Data gathered by Gauss and Goldschmidt on the growth of the logarithmic integral compared to the distribution of prime numbers was cited by Riemann in " On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude", Riemann's seminal paper on the prime-counting function. In 183 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gotthold Eisenstein
Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein (16 April 1823 – 11 October 1852) was a German mathematician. He specialized in number theory and analysis, and proved several results that eluded even Gauss. Like Galois and Abel before him, Eisenstein died before the age of 30. He was born and died in Berlin, Prussia. Early life His parents, Johann Konstantin Eisenstein and Helene Pollack, were of Jewish descent and converted to Protestantism prior to his birth. From an early age, he demonstrated talent in mathematics and music. As a young child he learned to play piano, and he continued to play and compose for piano throughout his life. He suffered various health problems throughout his life, including meningitis as an infant, a disease that took the lives of all five of his brothers and sisters. In 1837, at the age of 14, he enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium, and soon thereafter at Friedrich Werder Gymnasium in Berlin. His teachers recognized his talents in mathematics, but by 15 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet
Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (; 13 February 1805 – 5 May 1859) was a German mathematician who made deep contributions to number theory (including creating the field of analytic number theory), and to the theory of Fourier series and other topics in mathematical analysis; he is credited with being one of the first mathematicians to give the modern formal definition of a function. Although his surname is Lejeune Dirichlet, he is commonly referred to by his mononym Dirichlet, in particular for results named after him. Biography Early life (1805–1822) Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet was born on 13 February 1805 in Düren, a town on the left bank of the Rhine which at the time was part of the First French Empire, reverting to Prussia after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. His father Johann Arnold Lejeune Dirichlet was the postmaster, merchant, and city councilor. His paternal grandfather had come to Düren from Richelette (or more likely Richelle), a small community north e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christoph Gudermann
Christoph Gudermann (25 March 1798 – 25 September 1852) was a German mathematician noted for introducing the Gudermannian function and the concept of uniform convergence, and for being the teacher of Karl Weierstrass, who was greatly influenced by Gudermann's course on elliptic functions in 1839–1840, the first such course to be taught in any institute. Biography Gudermann was born in Vienenburg. He was the son of a school teacher and became a teacher himself after studying at the University of Göttingen, where his academic advisor was Karl Friedrich Gauss. He began his teaching career in Kleve and then transferred to a school in Münster. Gudermann introduced the concept of uniform convergence in an 1838 paper on elliptic functions, but only observed it informally, neither formalizing it nor using it in his proofs. Instead, Weierstrass elaborated and applied uniform convergence. His researches into spherical geometry and special functions focused on particular cases, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johann Franz Encke
Johann Franz Encke (; 23 September 179126 August 1865) was a German astronomer. Among his activities, he worked on the calculation of the periods of comets and asteroids, measured the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and made observations of the planet Saturn. Biography Encke was born in Hamburg, where his father was the Pastor at St. James' Church, Hamburg. He was the youngest of eight children, and at the time his father died, when he was four years old, the family was in straitened circumstances. Thanks to the financial assistance of a teacher, he was able to be educated at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums. He studied mathematics and astronomy from 1811 at the University of Göttingen under Carl Friedrich Gauss, but he enlisted in the Hanseatic Legion for the campaign of 1813–1814, serving as a sergeant in the artillery of the Prussian army, in Holstein and Mecklenburg. In 1814 he resumed his studies at the University, but after Napoleon's escape from Elba he retur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilhelm Klinkerfues
Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Klinkerfues (29 March 1827 in Hofgeismar – 28 January 1884 in Göttingen) was a German astronomer and meteorologist. He discovered six comets and published weather reports of varying accuracy based on his meteorological measurements. Early life Klinkerfues was born in Hofgeismar, the son of army doctor Johann Reinhard Klinkerfues and his wife Sabine (née Dedolph). After the early death of his parents, he was brought up by relatives, and after attending high school qualified as a surveyor in Kassel. In this capacity he subsequently worked on the new Frankfurt - Kassel railway. From 1847 to 1851 Klinkerfues studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Marburg. He then became an assistant to Carl Friedrich Gauss at Göttingen Observatory, where he completed his Ph.D. with a thesis on orbit calculations of double stars. After Gauss' death in 1855, the mathematician W. E. Weber replaced him as director, but Klinkerfues was to be temporarily ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moritz Cantor
Moritz Benedikt Cantor (23 August 1829 – 10 April 1920) was a German historian of mathematics. Biography Cantor was born at Mannheim. He came from a Sephardi Jewish family that had emigrated to the Netherlands from Portugal, another branch of which had established itself in Russia. In his early youth, Moritz Cantor was not strong enough to go to school, and his parents decided to educate him at home. Later, however, he was admitted to an advanced class of the Gymnasium in Mannheim. From there he went to the University of Heidelberg in 1848, and soon after to the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Gauss and Weber, and where Stern awakened in him a strong interest in historical research. After obtaining his PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 1851, he went to Berlin, where he eagerly followed the lectures of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet; and upon his return to Heidelberg in 1853, he was appointed privat-docent at the university. In 1863, he was promoted to t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters
Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters (September 19, 1813 – July 18, 1890) was a German–American university teacher and astronomer at the Litchfield Observatory of Hamilton College, New York, and a pioneer in the study and visual discovery of asteroids. His name is often given as . Biography He was born in Koldenbüttel in Schleswig, then part of Denmark but later part of Germany, and later studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss. His younger brother was the German explorer Wilhelm Peters. Peters spoke many languages and gravitated to Italy at the time of the Italian unification. His association with radical groups brought him to the attention of authorities, and he fled to the Ottoman Empire, where he became a government advisor. At the suggestion of the resident U.S. consul, he emigrated to the United States in 1854. In 1874, Peters headed a United States Naval Observatory expedition to Queenstown, New Zealand, to observe the Transit of Venus. The visit is marked with a plaq ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bernhard Riemann
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (; 17 September 1826 – 20 July 1866) was a German mathematician who made contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first rigorous formulation of the integral, the Riemann integral, and his work on Fourier series. His contributions to complex analysis include most notably the introduction of Riemann surfaces, breaking new ground in a natural, geometric treatment of complex analysis. His 1859 paper on the prime-counting function, containing the original statement of the Riemann hypothesis, is regarded as a foundational paper of analytic number theory. Through his pioneering contributions to differential geometry, Riemann laid the foundations of the mathematics of general relativity. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Biography Early years Riemann was born on 17 September 1826 in Breselenz, a village near ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
