Person: Hankel, Hermann
Hermann Hankel was a German mathematician who worked on the theory of complex numbers, the theory of functions and the history of mathematics. He is remembered for the Hankel transform and the Hankel matrix.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Following the tradition in Germany at that time Hankel did not complete his studies at one university, but moved to several different universities during the course of his studies.
- Hankel's habilitation was accepted in 1863 and he began teaching at Leipzig where he was appointed extraordinary professor in 1867.
- The appointment as extraordinary professor had been in the spring but by the autumn of the same year Hankel was at Erlangen to take up an appointment as ordinary professor.
- Beginning with a revised statement of George Peacock's principle of permanence of formal laws, he developed complex numbers as well as such higher algebraic systems as Möbius's barycentric calculus, some of Hermann Grassmann's algebras, and W R Hamilton's quaternions.
- Hankel was the first to recognise the significance of Grassmann's long-neglected writings ...
- Hankel looked at Riemann's integration theory and restated it in terms of measure theoretic concepts.
- He is remembered for the Hankel transformation which occurs in the study of functions which depend only on the distance from the origin.
- He also studied functions, now named Hankel functions or Bessel functions of the third kind, in a series of papers which appeared in Mathematische Annalen.
- In the same way that he saw the importance of Grassmann's work, Hankel also must have considerable credit for seeing the importance of Bolzano's work on infinite series.
Born 14 February 1839, Halle, Germany. Died 29 August 1873, Schramberg (near Tübingen), Germany.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Algebra, Analysis, Origin Germany
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
