Person: Bruns, Ernst Heinrich

Heinrich Bruns was a German scientist who was interested in astronomy, mathematics and geodesy and worked on the three body problem.

Bruns studied in Berlin from 1866 to 1871, obtaining a doctorate under Weierstrass and Kummer in 1871 for his thesis De proprietate quadam functionis potentialis corporum homogeneorum Ⓣ(The property of a potential function of a homogeneous body).
In 1873 Bruns left Pulkovo to take up the position of observer at the Dorpat Observatory (now Tartu, Estonia).
Peter Carl Ludwig Schwarz had taken over from Thomas Clausen when he retired as director in the year before Bruns arrived at the Observatory.
After three years at Dorpat, Bruns was appointed as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Berlin where he remained until 1882.
Bruns was the second director, the first being Carl Christian Bruhns who held the position from 1861 until his death in 1881.
Bruns held these positions until his death in 1919.
Bruns was interested in astronomy, mathematics and geodesy.
Bruns showed in 1887 that there could be no conserved quantities which could be expressible as algebraic functions of the positions and velocities of the three bodies.
A few years later Poincaré extended Bruns' work to show that no solution to the three-body problem was possible given by algebraic expressions and integrals.
In addition to this major contribution to the three-body problem, Bruns also published major contributions to potential theory.

Born 4 September 1848, Berlin, Germany. Died 23 September 1919, Leipzig, Germany.

View full biography at MacTutor

Astronomy, Origin Germany, Physics

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

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