Carl Gottfried Neumann (nonfiction)

Carl Gottfried Neumann.

Carl Gottfried Neumann (also Karl; 7 May 1832 – 27 March 1925) was a German mathematician.

Neumann was born in Königsberg, Prussia, as the son of the mineralogist, physicist and mathematician Franz Ernst Neumann (1798-1895), who was professor of mineralogy and physics at Königsberg University. Carl Neumann studied in Königsberg and Halle and was a professor at the universities of Halle, Basel, Tübingen, and Leipzig.

While in Königsberg, he studied physics with his father, and later as a working mathematician, dealt almost exclusively with problems arising from physics. Stimulated by Bernhard Riemann's work on electrodynamics, Neumann developed a theory founded on the finite propagation of electrodynamic actions, which interested Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Clausius into striking up a correspondence with him. Weber described Neumann's professorship at Leipzig as for "higher mechanics, which essentially encompasses mathematical physics," and his lectures did so.

James Clerk Maxwell makes reference to the electrodynamic theory developed by Weber and Neumann in the Introduction to A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1864).

Neumann worked on the Dirichlet principle, and can be considered one of the initiators of the theory of integral equations.

The Neumann series is named after him.

Together with Alfred Clebsch, Neumann founded the mathematical research journal Mathematische Annalen.

He died in Leipzig.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Mathematician
• Mathematics

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Alfred Clebsch Neumann (nonfiction)
• Bernhard Riemann (nonfiction)
• Franz Ernst Neumann (nonfiction)
• James Clerk Maxwell (nonfiction)
• Mathematician (nonfiction)
• Mathematics (nonfiction)
• Rudolf Clausius (nonfiction)
• Wilhelm Eduard Weber (nonfiction)

External links:

• Carl Gottfried Neumann @ Wikipedia