Ferdinand Nesselmann

Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (born February 24, 1811 in Fürstenau (today Kmiecin, district of Nowy Dwór Gdański ); † January 7, 1881 in Königsberg ) was a German orientalist and mathematician .

Life

Ferdinand Nesselmann studied mathematics (with Carl Gustav Jacobi and Friedrich Julius Richelot ) and oriental studies under Peter van Bohlen in Königsberg from 1831 to 1837 , where he received his doctorate in 1837. There he was then a private lecturer in oriental studies, from 1843 associate professor and from 1859 full professor for Arabic and Sanskrit . Among other things, he published the art of arithmetic by Mohammed Beha-eddin ben Alhossain (1842). In 1842 his “Attempt at a Critical History of Algebra” appeared in Berlin, of which only the first volume appeared on ancient Greek algebra, including a translation of Archimedes' cattle problem . In the history of algebra, Nesselmann distinguished a rhetorical phase, which included the time before Diophantine of Alexandria and expressed everything in words, a syncopian phase that began with Diophant and sometimes used symbols for unknowns and powers, and modern algebra, a symbolic phase that began with François Viète and Descartes .

In the mid-1840s, Nesselmann's research interest shifted to linguistic and linguistic history studies on the Baltic language area. He published on the "Language of the Old Prussians" (1845), he published a "Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language" (1850) and published "Littauische Volkslieder" (1853), and finally in 1873 the "Thesaurus linguae Prussicae". In 1845 Nesselmann introduced "Baltic" as a collective term for Old Prussian, Lithuanian and Latvian in linguistics. (→ Baltic languages ) His interest in the relationship between the Indo-European languages was also evident in the fact that he arranged the Lithuanian words in his “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” - as is usual in Sanskrit dictionaries - according to their roots .

Nesselmann was a Freemason and from 1845 until his death in 1881 a member of the Königsberg lodge Zum Todtenkopf and Phoenix , to which Peter von Bohlen also belonged for a time.

Fonts

• Attempt at a critical history of algebra , G. Reimer, Berlin 1842
• The language of the old Prussians explained on their remains , Reimer, Berlin 1845
• Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language , Bornträger Brothers, Königsberg 1851
• Lithuanian folk songs, collected, critically edited and metrically translated , Dümmler, Berlin 1853
• A German-Prussian vocabulary from the beginning of the 15th century. Edited from an Elbingen manuscript . In: Old Prussian Monthly Vol. 4, Issue 5, Königsberg 1868
• Thesaurus linguae prussicae. The Prussian vocabulary stock, insofar as it has been determined up to now, together with the addition of a collection of authenticated local names , Dümmler, Berlin 1873 (Reprint 1969), digitized in the Open Library
• Chr. A. Lobeck . Poem, performed on November 29, 1860 at the funeral for Christian August Lobeck . In: New Prussian Provincial Papers . Volume 6, Königsberg 1860, pp. 251-252.

literature

• Moritz Cantor :  Nesselmann, Ferdinand . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1886, p. 445 f.
• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (Ed.): Writing the history of mathematics. Its historical development . Birkhäuser, Basel et al. 2002, ISBN 3-7643-6167-0 , ( Science networks 27).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ according to the ADB, according to other sources February 14th
2. ↑ Beha-Eddin (1547-1622) was a Syrian mathematician. Florian Cajori ( History of Mathematics ) compared his algebra textbook Essenz der Algebra with that of Al-Chwarizmi . It also contains problems about Diophantine equations and one of the first indications of the unsolvability of the Fermat equation to the power of three.
3. ^ Friedrich Scholz: The literatures of the Baltic States. Their creation and development . (= Treatises of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften , vol. 80). Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1990. ISBN 3-531-05097-4 . P. 189.
4. ↑ Otto Hieber : History of the United Johannis Lodge to Todtenkopf and Phoenix zu Königsberg i. Pr.Königsberg 1897, self-published by the author, p. 315