von Staudt

Carl Georg Christian von Staudt

Born: 24 Jan 1798 in Imperial Free City of Rothenburg (now Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany)
Died: 1 June 1867 in Erlangen, Bavaria (now Germany)

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Von Staudt attended Göttingen from 1818 to 1822. His early work was on determining the orbit of a comet and, based on this work, he received a doctorate from Erlanger in 1822 . Staudt was appointed professor of mathematics at the Polytechnic School at Nürnberg in 1827 and he was appointed to the University of Erlangen in 1835.

Von Staudt showed how to construct a regular inscribed polygon of 17 sides using only compasses. He turned to projective geometry and Bernoulli (Jacob Bernoulli) numbers. An important work on projective geometry, Geometrie der Lage was published in 1847. It was the first work to completely free projective geometry from any metrical basis. Another of his publications on projective geometry was Beiträge zur Geometrie der Lage (1856-60). He also gave a nice geometric solution to quadratic equations.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. M Noether, Zur Erinnerung an Karl Georg Christian von Staudt, Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung 32 (1923), 97-119.
  4. C Segre, Carl Georg Christian von Staudt ed i suoi lavori, Geometrica di posizione de Staudt (Turin, 1888), 1-17. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996