Franz Woepcke

Franz Wöpcke (born May 6, 1826 in Dessau , † March 25, 1864 in Paris ) was a German mathematician and orientalist who lived in France for a long time.

He was the son of the postal director Ernst Ludwig Wöpcke from Wittenberg . After studying oriental studies for two years at the University of Bonn , in Leiden and Paris (1850), he was habilitated as a private lecturer in Bonn in March 1850 without having given lectures. However, he did not take up this service, but traveled to Paris for a long time. In 1856 the position in Bonn officially expired. In 1855 he made his first big trip to Persia . In 1856 he accepted a teaching position (mathematics and physics) at the French grammar school in Berlin, which he held until 1858. Then drifted into longing back to archive studies in Paris and Rome. He died in Paris in 1864.

Wöpcke put u. a. presented several publications on the history of mathematics among the Arabs. He edited the algebra of Omar Chajjam and Abu Bakr al-Karadschi (1853), dealt with the development of the Indo-Arabic numerical system, Fibonacci, and with the reconstruction of the works of Euclid and Apollonius from Arabic translations.

Works

• L'algèbre d'Omar Alkhayyâmî , publiée, traduite et accompagnée de manuscrits inédits, Paris, 1851, online at archive.org
• Etudes sur les Mathématiques arabo-islamiques , Frankfurt 1986

literature

• Moritz Cantor :  Woepcke, Franz . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 44, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1898, pp. 209 f.
• Theodor Arendt: Franz Wöpcke . In: Historical Commission for the Province of Saxony and for Anhalt (Hrsg.): Mitteldeutsche Lebensbilder. Volume 2: Pictures of the 19th Century. Self-published, Magdeburg 1927, pp. 361–374.
• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (Ed.): Writing the history of mathematics. Its historical development . Birkhäuser, Basel a. a. 2002, ISBN 3-7643-6167-0 , ( Science networks 27).