Leo Koenigsberger
German mathematician, historian and biographer
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Leo Koenigsberger (15 October 1837 – 15 December 1921) was a German mathematician, and historian of science. He is best known for his three-volume biography[1] of Hermann von Helmholtz, which remains the standard reference on the subject.
- Johann Koenigsberger
- Ani Koenigsberger
Leo Koenigsberger | |
|---|---|
Photograph of Leo Königsberger, 1886 | |
| Born | 15 October 1837 |
| Died | 15 December 1921 (aged 84) |
| Alma mater | University of Berlin (Ph.D., 1860) |
| Children |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Heidelberg University of Vienna |
| Thesis | De motu puncti versus duo fixa centra attracti (1860) |
| Karl Weierstrass Ernst Kummer | |
Doctoral students | Gustav Mie Karl Bopp Jakob Horn Edmund Husserl Gyula Kőnig Martin Krause Georg Alexander Pick Alfred Pringsheim Mór Réthy Max Wolf |
Biography
Leo Koenigsberger was born in 1837 in Posen (now Poznań, Poland) to the wealthy merchant Jakob Löb (1800–1882) and Henriette Kantorowicz (1810–1895) and had eleven siblings.[2] He studied at the University of Berlin with Karl Weierstrass, where he taught mathematics and physics (1860–64). He taught at the University of Greifswald (assistant professor, 1864–66; professor, 1866–69), the University of Heidelberg (1869–75), the Technische Universität Dresden (1875–77), and the University of Vienna (1877–84) before returning to Heidelberg in 1884, where remained until his retirement in 1914.[3]
Whilst at Heidelberg he was elected to honorary membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 17 April 1895 [4]
In 1904 he was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in Heidelberg.[5] In 1919 he published his autobiography, Mein Leben ('My Life'). The biography of Helmholtz was published in 1902 and 1903. He also wrote a biography of C. G. J. Jacobi.[3]
Koenigsberger's own research was primarily on elliptic functions and differential equations. He worked closely with Lazarus Fuchs, a childhood friend.[3]
In 1873, he married in Heidelberg Sophie Beral-Kappel, daughter of the merchant Iwanowitsch Beral of Kharkov and Anna Grigoriewna Tschaikowski. They had a son and a daughter, Johann Koenigsberger (1874), professor of physics in Freiburg, and Ani Koenigsberger (1876).[2][6]
Selected publications
- Vorlesungen über die Theorie der elliptischen Functionen, nebst einer Einleitung in die allgemeine Functionenlehre
- Vorlesungen über die Theorie der hyperelliptischen Integrale, Teubner 1878, Project Gutenberg
- Allgemeine Üntersuchungen aus der Theorie der Differentialgleichungen
- Lehrbuch der Theorie der Differentialgleichungen mit einer unabhängigen Variabeln
- Zur Geschichte der Theorie der elliptischen Transcendenten in den Jahren 1826–29, Teubner 1879, Project Gutenberg
- Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, Teubner 1904.
- "Gedächtnisrede auf C. G. J. Jacobi von L. Koenigsberger". Verhandlungen des dritten Mathematiker-Kongresses in Heidelberg von 8. bis 13. August 1904. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. 1905. pp. 57–85.
- Mein Leben, Heidelberg 1919. (Erw. Ausgabe. Univ. Heidelberg 2015.)
