Person: Schröter, Heinrich
Heinrich Schröter was a German mathematician, who studied geometry.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Heinrich was the eldest of his parents three sons.
- Schröter quickly learnt the foundations of the differential calculus and he decided that he wanted to apply mathematics.
- Schröter was the first of a number outstanding mathematics pupils at the Königsberg Gymnasium, all influenced by Müttrich; Rudolf Lipschitz, Carl Neumann, and Alfred Clebsch were three to four years behind Schröter.
- The University of Königsberg had become a leading centre for mathematics during the years that Carl Jacobi worked there but he left for Berlin in June 1844 shortly before Schröter began his studies.
- Another outstanding mathematician at Königsberg at this time was Franz Neumann who had begun working there three years before Schröter was born but was at the peak of his creativity in the 1840s.
- Among these inspiring teachers it was Richelot who influenced Schröter most, introducing him to Jacobi's work on function theory.
- Schröter graduated from Königsberg in 1848 after which he spent two years doing voluntary military service in the artillery before he began to undertake research for his doctorate at the University of Berlin.
- He attended courses by Dirichlet on number theory and on differential equations which influenced Schröter's teaching for the whole of his career but it was Steiner who was a major influence on Schröter's research.
- Partly this influence was through the courses Steiner delivered, but his greatest influence on Schröter was through personal contacts.
- Immediately after graduating, Schröter took the state examinations to become a Gymnasium mathematics teacher but quickly decided on an academic career.
- Schröter was a colleague of Joachimsthal until his death in 1861 when Schröter succeeded to the Breslau chair.
- Schröter remained in Breslau for the rest of his life despite being offered another chair.
- When Alfred Clebsch left Giessen to take up the chair at Göttingen in 1868, Schröter was offered the Giessen chair but he turned it down.
- Schröter created at Breslau the leading centre for synthetic geometry.
- In 1861 Schröter published Über Modulargleichungen der elliptischen Functionen, Auszug aus einem Schreiben an Herrn L Kronecker Ⓣ(On modular equations of elliptic functions: extract from a letter to Kronecker).
- This important work became the textbook for the synthetic geometry of conics with a second edition appearing in 1876 and a third edition in 1898 after Schröter's death.
- In 1888 Schröter published a book on third-order plane curves Die Theorie der ebenen Curven dritter Ordnung, auf synthetische Weise abgeleitet Ⓣ(The theory of the flat curves of the third order, derived synthetically) and in 1890 he published his major study on fourth-order space curves in Grundzüge einer rein geometrischen Theorie der Raumcurven vierter Ordnung erster Species Ⓣ(General purely geometric theory of space curves of the fourth order, first species).
- Schröter was honoured for his contributions to synthetic geometry.
- Finally we mentions Schröter's interests outside mathematics.
Born 8 January 1829, Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Died 3 January 1892, Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland).
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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
