Anna Barbara Reinhart

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anonymous portrait of Anna Barbara Reinhart in dotted and copper engraving
Four views by Reinhart, anonymous graphic

Anna Barbara Reinhart (* July 12, 1730 in Winterthur ; † January 5, 1796 there ), also Barbara Reinhart , was a Swiss mathematician .

Life

Anna Barbara was born in 1730 as the third child and first daughter of Councilor Salomon Reinhart (1693–1761) and Anna Steiner. Her childhood was overshadowed by an accident when she fell off her horse at a wedding party. The attending physician Johann Heinrich Hegner discovered her gifted mathematics and gave her mathematics lessons. She learned Latin and French and studied independently works by Leonhard Euler , Gabriel Cramer , Pieter van Musschenbroek , Jérôme Lalande and Isaac Newton . Reinhart corresponded with and received visits from many important scholars of her time. She also gave mathematics lessons, with Ulrich Hegner , the later writer and son of Johann Heinrich Hegner, and Heinrich Bosshard von Rümikon , a well-known lay preacher , among her students.

She did not publish any of her own works, but wrote extensive handwritten notes on the works she read. In a letter to Christoph Jezler dated April 8, 1767, Reinhart wrote:

"I do not think that when I die my friends will burn these manuscripts in my memory in order to put their ashes on mine. Rather, [I] think Hr. Dr. Hegner would keep it in memory of our friendship and that I was here once. "

This hope was not fulfilled; Reinhart survived both Hegner and Jezler, and their manuscripts have been lost. It has been suggested that they were used as wrapping paper after her death.

Barbara Reinhart died in 1796 at the age of 65 from the effects of gout and the aftermath of an accident in her childhood from which she was never able to fully recover.

reception

Reinhart is and was regarded by important mathematicians as one of the most important mathematicians of the 18th century: for example by Johann II Bernoulli , who put her above Émilie du Châtelet , and also by Daniel Bernoulli , who improved and expanded the solution to the persecution problem by Pierre- Louis Moreau de Maupertuis praised. In 2003 a street was named after her on the Sulzer site in her hometown.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Wolf: Barbara Reinhart von Winterhur . 1730-1796. In: Biographies on the cultural history of Switzerland . 1st cycle. Drell, Füßli & Camp, Zurich 1858, p. 342 (English, online [accessed September 19, 2019] digitized by ETH Zurich).
  2. ↑ The original problem (posed and solved by Pierre Bouguer ) is looking for the path of a ship B that is following another ship A that is moving in a straight line. The bow of B always points to A. Initially, their speeds are at right angles to each other. The amounts of the speeds are constant and have a constant ratio to one another. Maupertuis extended the problem to curves other than straight lines for A.
  3. ^ Joachim Feltkamp: Frauenzimmer - 1700-1800. University of Hamburg, April 23, 2004, archived from the original on February 5, 2001 ; accessed on September 19, 2019 (original website no longer available). on a page about women mathematicians of the 18th century.
    Margaret Alic: Hypatia's daughters. Unionsverlag, Zurich 1987, footnote 202, p. 229;
    HJ Mozans: Woman in Science. New York 1913, p. 154.
personal data
SURNAME Reinhart, Anna Barbara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reinhart, Barbara
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1730
PLACE OF BIRTH Winterthur
DATE OF DEATH January 5, 1796
Place of death Winterthur