Johann Heinrich Lambert

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Johann Heinrich Lambert
(lithograph by Godefroy Engelmann , 1829)

Johann Heinrich Lambert (born August 26, 1728 in Mulhouse ( Alsace ), † September 25, 1777 in Berlin ) was a Swiss-Alsatian mathematician , logician , physicist and philosopher of the Enlightenment , who among other things proved the irrationality of the number Pi .

Life

Lambert came from an impoverished Huguenot refugee family in time for the Swiss Confederation related Mulhouse in Alsace had settled. His father was a tailor. Despite his remarkably good performance, the son had to leave the city school at the age of twelve and work as his father's assistant. But he continued to educate himself with the help of all books available to him. He later worked as an accountant, then from 1746 as a private secretary to Isaak Iselin in Basel and two years later as a tutor to the Imperial Count Peter von Salis in Chur . With his children he went on several educational trips between 1756 and 1758 , and he became a member of the Swiss Société scientifique in Basel. His first publications (on heat theory ) were made in 1755 . As part of the Grand Tour with his students he visited Göttingen ( Abraham Kästner , Tobias Mayer ), where he became a member of the Göttingen Society of Sciences , before the Seven Years' War he avoided Utrecht and the Netherlands, where he stayed with his students for two years and he had his first book (on optics ) printed in The Hague in 1758, and Paris, where he met Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert .

In 1758 Lambert lived in Augsburg and joined the group of founding members of the "Electoral Academy of Sciences", later the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , in whose philosophical class he became an external member in 1759. He undertook optical experiments and had two books printed in Augsburg (on photometry and cosmology ). Plans for a professorship in Göttingen came to nothing. In 1764 he was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin at the suggestion of Leonhard Euler (who had already proposed him for an astronomy professorship in Saint Petersburg in 1760 ) and in 1770 received a well-paid position as senior building officer and "membrum honorarium" in the newly created building department . At first there were difficulties with Frederick the Great because of Lambert's eccentric behavior, but these subsided when Frederick recognized his scientific importance. In Berlin, the relationship with Euler deteriorated over questions about the financing of the academy - Euler went to Saint Petersburg in 1766. Until his untimely death at the age of only 49, Lambert published 150 treatises in the communications of the Prussian Academy .

Services

Lambert was one of the most outstanding mathematicians and logicians of his time. He founded the theory of measuring the intensity of light as a science in his work Photometria sive de mensura et gradibus luminis, colorum et umbrae (Augsburg 1760). He further researched the theory of the mouthpiece - even with hearing loss since birth .

Especially in Photometria , but also in his book Contributions to the Use of Mathematics and their Application (Vol. 1, 1765), he linked ideas from Thomas Simpson , Rugjer Josip Bošković and Mayer. His work in photometry and geodesy led him to a general theory of errors. He discussed the problem of applying probability distributions to error terms and already used a maximum likelihood method for determining mean values .

In addition, the enlightened scholar earned services to epistemology , to which he dedicated his work New Organon, or Thoughts on the Research and Designation of the True (2 vols., Leipzig 1764). He divided the work into four parts: the first volume contains dianoiology (or the doctrine of the laws of thought) and alethiology (or the doctrine of truth ). The second volume deals with semantics or semiotics (theory of signs) and finally phenomenology (by which Lambert understands the theory of appearances).

According to his own words from the introduction, the work is particularly inspired by Christian Wolff and John Locke , with the first part, the dianoiology, being particularly based on Wolff. Indeed, there are many similarities to Wolff's Reasonable Thoughts of the Powers of the Human Mind . However, Lambert also makes it clear that he not only adopted Wolff's ideas, but also expanded them with his own insights. The aim of his work was to use mathematics to create a better methodology for philosophy . He is considered a pioneer of modern rationalism and an important predecessor of Immanuel Kant , with whom he corresponded from 1765 to 1770.

In 1759 the first edition of his Freye Perspective , which made him widely known, appeared, and in 1774 the second edition. The writings on Perspective were published by Max Steck in 1943 and provided with a detailed bibliography of all of Lambert's works.

A broken chain for the tangent from on page 288 of Lambert's Mémoires sur quelques propriétés remarquables des quantités transcendantes, circulaires et logarithmiques , Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences de Berlin (1768), 265–322.

In 1761 (printed in 1768) Lambert demonstrated the irrationality of the circle number with the help of the theory of continued fractions . He also proved that and for non-zero rational arguments are irrational. Lambert also hypothesized that e and are transcendent numbers .

He undertook the first systematic study of the hyperbolic functions , made important contributions to spherical trigonometry and was a pioneer of non-Euclidean geometry : in his theory of parallel lines of 1766, he proved many theorems of non-Euclidean geometry by assuming that the axiom of parallelism is invalid.

In 1772 he developed several map projections , including the frequently used conformal cone projection . In the same year he also published Lambert's pyramid of colors .

In 1774 he founded with Johann Elert Bode the Tafelwerk Berlin Astronomical Yearbook . His method of determining the orbit of comets found the admiration of Joseph-Louis Lagrange . His book on cosmology ( Cosmological Letters 1761) represented the universe as a collection of galaxies of stars.

The Anglo-American unit of measurement for luminance was named after him, Lambert . The asteroid (187) Lamberta, discovered in 1878, and a crater ( Lambert ) each on the Earth's moon and the planet Mars were named after him .

The mathematician Georg Faber (1877–1966) wrote about Lambert in 1959:

“Lambert was, in light and shadow, the right image of a scholar of the 18th century who writes everything about God and the world, but does not teach from a lectern. Among the 2500 members that the (Munich) academy had in the two hundred years of its existence, there is no other of its kind. "

Fonts

  • The propriétés remarquables de la route de la lumière par les airs et en général par plusieurs milieux refringens, spheriques et concentriques. (La Haye 1758)
  • The free perspective or instruction to produce any perspective elevation of free pieces and without a floor plan. (Zurich 1759)
  • Photometria sive de mensura et gradibus luminis, colorum et umbrae. (Basel 1760)
  • Insigniores orbitae cometarum proprietates. (Basel 1761)
  • Cosmological letters on the establishment of the world structure. (Augsburg 1761) Digitized and full text in the German text archive , digitized
  • New organon or thoughts on the exploration and designation of the true and its differentiation from error and appearance. (Leipzig 1764) Digitized and full text in the German Text Archive Vol. 1, Digitized and full text in the German Text Archive Vol. 2
  • Contributions to the use of mathematics and its application. 3 volumes (Berlin 1765, 1770, 1772)
  • Notes on the violence of gunpowder and the resistance of the air. (Dresden 1766) Digitized
  • Additions to the logarithmic and trigonometric tables to facilitate and abbreviate the calculations that occur when using mathematics. (Berlin 1770)
  • Attachment to the architectonics or theory of the simple and first in philosophical and mathematical knowledge. 2 volumes. (Hartknoch, Riga 1771) Digitized and full text in the German Text Archive Vol. 1, Digitized and full text in the German Text Archive Vol. 2
  • Description of a color pyramid painted with Calauze waxes, where the mixture of each color from white and three basic colors is arranged, explained and shown to the same calculation and multiple use. (Berlin 1772) Digitized
  • Pyrometry, or the measure of fire and warmth. (Berlin 1779)
  • German learned correspondence. Edited by Johann III Bernoulli . 5 volumes (Berlin 1782–1785)
  • Logical and Philosophical Treatises. Edited by Joh. III Bernoulli. 2 volumes. (Dessau 1782 and 1784)
  • Philosophical writings. 10 vols. In 13 vols. Started by Hans Werner Arndt, continued by Lothar Kreimendahl . Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965–2008
  • Johann Heinrich Lambert's monthly book. New ed., Imported, come. u. with lists of Lambert's writings, letters, etc. posthumous manuscripts vers. by Niels W. Bokhove u. Armin Emmel. 2 vols. (= Philosophical writings, supplement). Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2020.

Primary texts

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Johann Heinrich Lambert  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Johann Heinrich Lambert  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ uni-mannheim.de: Data Biography Johann Heinrich Lambert
  2. ^ GStA PK I. HA GD, Abt. 30, I, Nr. 22
  3. ↑ Miklós Laczkovich: On Lambert's Proof of the Irrationality of π . In: The American Mathematical Monthly . tape 104 , no. 5 , May 1997, pp. 439-443 , doi : 10.2307 / 2974737 .


personal data
SURNAME Lambert, Johann Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1728
PLACE OF BIRTH Mulhouse ( Alsace )
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1777
Place of death Berlin