Johann Christian Martin Bartels

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Johann Christian Martin Bartels.

Johann Christian Martin Bartels (* 12. August 1769 in Braunschweig ; † 7 jul. / 19th December  1836 greg. In Dorpat, Livonia , now Tartu , Estonia ) was a German mathematician who in Switzerland and in Russia worked. Carl Friedrich Gauß and Nikolai Iwanowitsch Lobatschewski were among his students .

Life

Studied in Germany

His parents were the tin caster Heinrich Elias Friedrich Bartels and his wife Johanna Christine Margarethe Köhler. As a child, Bartels showed a great interest in mathematics. In 1783 he became an assistant to Jürgen Büttner at his writing and arithmetic school. There he supported the talent of the young Carl Friedrich Gauß, with whom he corresponded from 1799-1823.

From 1788 to 1791 Bartels attended the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig. He supported his math teacher Eberhard August Wilhelm Zimmermann with translations from English and Italian. Then he studied in Helmstedt and Goettingen two years each jurisprudence . However, his main interest was in mathematics lectures. This stopped at the former Johann Friedrich Pfaff University , at the latter Abraham Gotthelf Kästner . In Göttingen, Bartels also heard physics from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg . Among his fellow students was the later head of the US coast survey, Ferdinand Rudolf Hassler from Aarau, Switzerland .

Teacher in Switzerland

School scene in Reichenau
(on the right, the later King of the French Louis-Philippe I).
Office building in Aarau, 1802–1896,
seat of the canton school.

From 1795 Bartels taught mathematics at the seminar in Reichenau ( Graubünden ). His predecessor was - under the pseudonym of the future King of France - Chabaud-Latour I. Louis-Philippe had been. Bartels received the position through the mediation of the Helmstedt theologian David Julius Pott . Seminar director Johann Peter Nesemann suggested that he publish a German version of the Histoire de l'astronomie by Jean-Sylvain Bailly . The new owner of the institute, the writer Heinrich Zschokke , befriended the “very good, brilliant Bartels”. The two corresponded with each other until 1833. When revolution and counterrevolution followed in Graubünden in 1798, the seminar had to close. Bartels temporarily found refuge with the beautiful Baroness von Salis in neighboring Haldenstein .

In 1799 he returned to Braunschweig. The University of Jena awarded him a doctorate for his unprinted work Elementa calculi variationum . In 1800 he became a teacher of mathematics and natural sciences at the Realschule and a member of the municipal school commission in Aarau, where the Helvetic Republic had been proclaimed two years earlier . From 1802 he taught mathematics, business subjects and Italian at the newly opened canton school in Aarau . The school's promoter, Johann Rudolf Meyer , was also a Lichtenberg student. From Aarau, Bartels visited Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in his educational institute in Burgdorf . In 1802 he married Anna Magdalena Saluz (1785–1847). Their father Peter Saluz was the rector of the city schools in Chur . The couple had the children Friedrich Eduard (* 1803) and Johanna Henriette Franziska (1807–1867). Bartels devoted his scant free time to higher mathematics. When in 1804 the new humanist Ernst August Evers became rector of the canton school, which had previously been run in the spirit of Pestalozzi, he resigned from his position.

Professor in Russia

University of Kazan, 1832.
University of Dorpat, 1821.

In 1805 Bartels received a call from Stepan Jakowlewitsch Rumowski , the curator of the Kazan University in Russia , which had opened the year before . But first he returned to Braunschweig, where, like Gauss, he entered the service of his sovereign Prince Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel . He had in mind the establishment of an observatory and a higher mathematical school. The aforementioned plans came to nothing when the Duke, as commander of the Prussian troops, was fatally wounded in the Battle of Auerstedt (1806).

At the end of 1807 Bartels set out with his wife, their four-year-old son, their seven-month-old daughter and the maid Elisabeth Jorns from Lütschental in the Bernese Oberland on the journey to Kazan , which lasted almost four months. In the capital of the Tatars he worked as a professor of mathematics and from 1813 as dean of the physics and mathematics faculty . His most gifted student and later his assistant and successor was Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. One of Bartels' colleagues from Aarau also ended up on the Volga : in 1810 the poet Franz Xaver Bronner received a chair for physics in Kazan, but returned to the canton school after Evers left (1817).

Bartels, for his part, moved to the University of Dorpat in the Baltic States, founded in 1802 in 1821 . There he was dean of the philosophical faculty several times. In 1823 he was appointed to the State Council. From 1826 he was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg . He laid the foundations for Dorpat to become a center of differential geometry . As can be seen from the dissertation of his assistant and later successor Karl Eduard Senff (1810–1849), Bartels anticipated the Frenet-Serret formulas . 1833 emeritus , he renounced the right to sit down to rest.

Works

  • Bailly's History of Modern Astronomy. First volume. Leipzig 1796.
  • Mr. Bailly's story of ancient astronomy. Second volume. Leipzig 1797.
  • Disquisitiones quatuor ad theoriam functionum analyticarum pertinentes pro munere in Academia Cæsarea Dorpatensi professoris matheseos publici ordinarii. Dorpati 1822.
  • Aperçu abrégé des formules fondamentales de la géométrie à trois dimensions. (Lu à l'Académie le 14 Déc 1825.) In: Memoires presentes a l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg, Volume 1, St. Pétersbourg 1831, pp 77-95.
  • Lectures on mathematical analysis with applications from geometry, mechanics and probability. 1. of 3 planned volumes, Dorpat 1833; 2nd edition, there in 1837, with foreword by Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve and 1st treatise of the 2nd volume in the appendix. (Contains an autobiography on pp. III – X.)

literature

  • Johann Friedrich v. Recke / Karl Eduard Napiersky: General encyclopedia of writers and scholars of the provinces of Livonia, Esthland and Courland . 1st volume, Mitau ( Jelgava ) 1827, pp. 73 f .; Supplements and continuations, 1st volume, Mitau 1859, p. 35 f.
  • Johann Martin Bartels (based on Johann Friedrich Erdmann's funeral speech ). In: The domestic. A weekly for Liv, Esth and Curland's history, geography, statistics and literature, Dorpat, 15./22. December 1837, columns 825-829, 841-845.
  • Moritz Cantor :  Gauss, Carl Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1878, pp. 430-445. (Mentioned Bartels.)
  • Kurt Vogel:  Bartels, Johann Martin Christian. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 598 ( digitized version ).
  • Kurt-Reinhard Biermann : The letters from Martin Bartels to C. F. Gauß. In: NTM - series for the history of natural sciences, technology and medicine, 10 (1973), pp. 5–22.
  • The same thing : a German mathematician moved from Braunschweig to Kazań in 1807/08, on the biography of M. Bartels, the teacher of Gauss and Lobačevskij. In: Historia Mathematica, 1 (1974), pp. 65-77.
  • Same: Martin Bartels - A key figure in non-Euclidean geometry? in: Leopoldina, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, 21 (1978), pp. 136–157.
  • Alexander Halameisär / Helmut Seibt: Nikolai Iwanowitsch Lobatschewski. Leipzig 1978.
  • Siegfried Gottwald: Lexicon of important mathematicians. Leipzig 1990.
  • Wolfgang W. Dick: Martin Bartels as a teacher of Carl Friedrich Gauß. In: Gauß-Gesellschaft e. V. Göttingen - Mitteilungen, 30 (1993), pp. 59-62.
  • Ülo Lumiste: Martin Bartels as researcher: his contribution to analytical methods in geometry. In: Historia mathematica, 24 (1997), pp. 46-65.
  • Waldo Dunnington , Jeremy Gray , Fritz-Egbert Dohse: Gauß - Titan of Science. The Mathematical Association of America, 2004. ISBN 978-0883855478 .
  • Hans-Joachim Heerde: The audience of physics - Lichtenberg's listener. Göttingen 2006.

Web links

Individual references, comments

  1. ^ Entry in the burial register of the St. John's Church in Dorpat (Estonian: Tartu Jaani kirik).
  2. ↑ William Smellie's Philosophy of Natural History in particular . 2 parts, Berlin 1791.
  3. ^ Heinrich Zschokke: A self-review. 1. Theil, Aarau 1842, p. 89.
  4. ↑ Ibid., P. 97 f. Johanna Justine von Salis-de Wilde was a middle-aged Dutch woman. She died in France in 1803 after giving birth to an illegitimate child. (Philippe-Antoine Merlin: Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence. 5 e édition, tome 17 e , Bruxelles 1827, pp. 481–494.)
  5. ^ Compare Wilhelm Benjamin Gautzsch : Biography of the blessed professor and pastor P. Salutz, in: Der neue Collector, 4th year, Chur 1808, pp. 289-324. (Gautzsch was Bartels' colleague in Aarau and then switched - probably through his mediation - to the cantonal school founded by Saluz in Chur.)
  6. ↑ He obtained his doctorate in Dorpat in 1829. med., where he stated “Helvetus” as his nationality, and became a Russian military doctor.
  7. ↑ In 1834 she married the director of the Dorpat observatory , Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve .
  8. ^ The sincere and experienced Swiss messenger (Aarau), August 5, 1808, follow-up .
  9. ^ Carolus Eduardus Senff: Theoremata principalia e theoria curvarum et superficierum. Dorpati Livonorum 1831.
  10. ↑ Named after the French mathematicians Jean Frédéric Frenet and Joseph Serret .
  11. ↑ Karin Reich: The history of differential geometry from Gauß to Riemann (1828–1868). In: Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 11 (1973), pp. 273-382, here: p. 282.
personal data
SURNAME Bartels, Johann Christian Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1769
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunschweig
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 1836
Place of death Dorpat