Caspar Wessel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memorial plaque in the castle garden in Oldenburg

Caspar Wessel (born June 8, 1745 in Jonsrud , Vestby , † March 25, 1818 in Copenhagen ) was a Norwegian-Danish mathematician and geodesist .

After attending school in Oslo , he went to the University of Copenhagen to study law . But for financial reasons he broke off and in 1764 became a cartographer for the Danish surveying commission, which was running a comprehensive surveying project at the time. Even though he still acquired the degree of "candidatus juris" in 1778 , he remained a surveyor throughout his life. In 1796 the survey of Denmark was completed.

In the meantime - from 1782 to 1785 - Wessel measured the Duchy of Oldenburg for the Oldenburg Bailiwick map .

In 1797, Wessel submitted his only mathematical work to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, entitled "Om Directionens analytiske betegning" ( On the analytical representation of direction ), which was published in 1799 in the Mémoires of the Danish Academy of Sciences. In it, Wessel proposed, independently of Jean Robert Argand, the geometric interpretation of complex numbers as points on the plane . Her work went unnoticed for a long time and was only rediscovered and appreciated in 1897 by the mathematician Christian Juel . Only a work by Carl Friedrich Gauß on square remains from 1831 helped this interpretation to break through.

In 1805 Caspar Wessel retired.

literature

  • Caspar Wessel: On the analytical representation of direction: an attempt applied chiefly to solving plane and spherical polygons; 1797 . Reitzel, Copenhagen 1999.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The implementation of the triangulation in the Duchy of Oldenburg. Retrieved March 18, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Wessel, Caspar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish-Norwegian mathematician and geodesist
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1745
PLACE OF BIRTH Jonsrud , Vestby
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 1818
Place of death Copenhagen