Person: Gudermann, Christoph

Christoph Gudermann worked on geometry and special functions. He taught Weierstrass.

Christoph was academically able in his schooling so, as many able boys at this time did, it was intended that he should train to became a priest.
Gudermann worked almost exclusively on spherical geometry and special functions but he is not remembered for any original mathematical results in these areas.
For this reason and because of its constant curvature there exist many similarities between spherical geometry and plane geometry; yet at the same time Gudermann considered more interesting the study of cases where the similarity no longer holds.
In his more extensive work on the theory of special functions Gudermann published several papers beginning in 1830 which extended work which was developed by Euler, Landen, Legendre, Abel and Jacobi.
Gudermann is best known, however, as the teacher of Weierstrass between 1839 and 1841 while Weierstrass worked for his secondary school teacher's certificate.
Gudermann, at this time, was particularly interested in the theory of elliptic functions and in the expansion of functions by power series.
Not only did Gudermann undertake research in the theory of elliptic functions but he was one of the first to teach the topic.
Weierstrass spent the academic year 1839-1840 taking Gudermann's course on elliptic functions.

Born 25 March 1798, Vienenburg (near Hildesheim), Germany. Died 25 September 1852, Münster, Germany.

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Origin Germany

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive