David Rytz von Brugg (1 April 1801, in Bucheggberg – 25 March 1868, in

Aarau Aarau (, ) is a List of towns in Switzerland, town, a Municipalities of Switzerland, municipality, and the capital of the northern Swiss Cantons of Switzerland, canton of Aargau. The List of towns in Switzerland, town is also the capital of the d ...

) was a Swiss

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and

teacher A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. w ...

Life

Rytz von Brugg was son of a

priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deity, deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in parti ...

and studied

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

Göttingen Göttingen (, ; ; ) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. According to the 2022 German census, t ...

and

Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...

. He had teaching positions at various cities, one of them 1835 until 1862 at Aarau, where he was ''„Professor der Mathematik an der Gewerbeschule zu Aarau“''.Alexander Ostermann, Gerhard Wanner: ''Geometry by Its History.'' 2012, S. 69

Merits

Rytz von Brugg is famous for a geometrical method which is known as Rytz’s axis construction. This classical procedure retrieves the semi-axes of an

Ellipse In mathematics, an ellipse is a plane curve surrounding two focus (geometry), focal points, such that for all points on the curve, the sum of the two distances to the focal points is a constant. It generalizes a circle, which is the special ty ...

from any pair of

conjugate diameters In geometry, two diameters of a conic section are said to be conjugate if each chord (geometry), chord parallel (geometry), parallel to one diameter is bisection, bisected by the other diameter. For example, two diameters of a circle are conjugate ...

. This method is known since 1845, when it was published within a paper by Leopold Moosbrugger.Siegfried Gottwald, Hans-Joachim Ilgauds, Karl-Heinz Schlote (Hrsg.): ''Lexikon bedeutender Mathematiker.'' 1990, S. 407Emil Müller und Erwin Kruppa ''Lehrbuch der darstellenden Geometrie.'' 1961, S. 98 .

Sources

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rytz, David 1801 births 1868 deaths Swiss mathematicians