Adolph Göpel

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Adolph Göpel (born September 29, 1812 in Rostock , † June 7, 1847 in Berlin ) was a German mathematician who was mainly known through a single posthumously published work on elliptical functions .

life and work

He was born as the son of a Saxon music teacher in Rostock , from whom he inherited a musical talent. At the age of 10 he went to Italy with a maternal uncle who was the English consul in Corsica , where they traveled frequently. The uncle tried to interest him in science, and he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Pisa in the winter semesters of 1825 and 1826 . In 1827 he returned to Rostock, attended grammar school and from 1829 the university in Berlin , where, in addition to mathematics and natural sciences, he also studied philosophy, history and philology . In 1835 he received his doctorate with a thesis on periodic continued fraction expansion of . According to Jacobi, it shows "great acumen". In the next twelve years, however, he did not write any work, except for a few small, "written with spirit" (so Jacobi) works 1843-5 for a magazine in Greifswald, as Jacobi mentions.

He became a teacher at the Friedrich-Werderschen Gymnasium , then at the Royal Realschule and then became a librarian at the Royal Library (at the Humboldt University in Berlin ). He was friends with the publisher August Crelle . On the other hand, he had no contact with the Berlin mathematicians.

In addition to his librarianship, he worked on a large thesis on elliptic functions, more precisely on the inverse functions of Abelian integrals, the generalization of the elliptic integrals and the associated functions to the case of the higher sex g of the corresponding Riemann surfaces . Elliptic functions correspond to g = 1 and are twice periodic, the next higher "hyperelliptic" functions have g = 2 and are four times periodic functions. He explicitly states these as four-fold periodic quotients of theta functions in two variables. Its squares provide the relations we are looking for, which later turned out to be connected with the geometry of the surface of concern . With this he achieved a breakthrough in what was then the most active and most competitive field of mathematical research (in which Jacobi worked, among others).

Göpel gave the work to Charles Hermite , to whom Carl Gustav Jacobi sent it. Hermite had come very close to Göpel's solution in a letter to Jacobi, published in the Crelle Journal in 1846, so that Göpel decided to publish it. A few weeks after the filing in March 1847, he dies of a "brief, painful" illness. Jacobi also notes that another mathematician came to the same results and had submitted a corresponding paper. It is about Johann Georg Rosenhain , who had submitted an award publication in Paris in 1846, but reported the results to Jacobi in letters as early as 1844–1847.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Adolph Göpel  - Sources and full texts

swell

  1. ↑ Jacobi in his obituary in Crelles Journal 1847, in which he also reports the results of the dissertation.
  2. ^ Jacobi, obituary in Crelle J.
  3. ↑ Rosenhain, Crelle J. Vol. 50, p. 319, Memoires savants etrangeres Vol. 11, Paris 1851
personal data
SURNAME Göpel, Adolph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1812
PLACE OF BIRTH Rostock
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1847
Place of death Berlin