Person: Graf, Johann Heinrich

Johann Heinrich Graf was a Swiss mathematician who worked mainly on the Bessel functions.

After having attended primary school in Töss and secondary school in Zürich, Graf studied at the private teachers' college Muristalden, close to Bern, from 1868-1871.
Graf was awarded his doctorate for his thesis Beiträge zur Theorie der Riemann'schen Fläche Ⓣ(Contributions to the theory of the Riemann surface) in 1877.
Graf's main mathematical interests were in Bessel functions, gamma functions and spherical functions.
Today he is best known for Graf addition theorems for Bessel functions and other such functions.
Graf also took a keen interest in actuarial sciences; he published a number of papers on insurance funds and lectured on actuarial mathematics from 1902-1918 at the University of Bern.
Graf also edited Schläfli's correspondence with Steiner, Arthur Cayley and Carl Borchardt.
Throughout his life, Graf held a large number of administrative positions.
For most of his professional life, Graf was a member of the Swiss and the Bernese Societies for Natural Scientists; he was the editor of the communications of the Bernese society from 1883-1910.
From 1895 until his death, Graf was president of the Swiss library committee.

Born 16 August 1852, Töss, Zürich, Switzerland. Died 17 June 1918, Bern, Switzerland.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Switzerland

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

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