Rudolf Mehmke

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Rudolf Mehmke (born August 28, 1857 in Bad Lauterberg in the Harz Mountains , † November 16, 1944 in Stuttgart ) was a German mathematician .

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Rudolf Mehmke was the son of a sculptor and modeller. He studied mathematics from 1873 (and architecture from 1875) at the Stuttgart Polytechnic , moved to Tübingen in 1877 and to Berlin in 1879/1880 , where he was a student of Karl Weierstrass , Ernst Eduard Kummer and Leopold Kronecker . In 1880 he received his doctorate from Paul Du Bois-Reymond in Tübingen ( application of Grassmann's theory of expansion to the geometry of circles in the plane ). From 1880 he was a lecturer at the Polytechnic in Stuttgart (repetent for higher analysis and mechanics with Carl Wilhelm Baur ) and from 1884 professor at the TH Darmstadt . From 1894 he was professor for performing and projective geometry at the Technical University in Stuttgart. In 1895 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In 1922 he retired. He was active as a pacifist with the Social Democrats and in the Paneuropean Union and was only spared internment during the Nazi era because of his age .

Mehmke was primarily an applied mathematician (at that time with Carl Runge in a leading position in Germany), who mainly taught descriptive geometry (book “Guide to Graphical Computing” 1917, 1924) and also developed mathematical devices (perspective ruler, slide rule for chemists, apparatus for numerical determination of the roots of equations). He wrote the article on numerical computing in the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences and was also significantly involved in the implementation of vector computation ( he had obtained his doctorate on the corresponding calculus by Hermann Graßmann ), especially in the context of the encyclopedia, encouraged and with participation from Felix Klein by Arnold Sommerfeld . He was also active in the spread of vector calculation in numerous articles , some of which were written in the artificial language Volapük . But it did not gain acceptance in schools until after the Second World War. Only the first volume of his book Lectures on Point and Vector Calculation was published by Teubner in 1913.

In 1924 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Dresden University of Technology .

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  1. ↑ Represented by Karin Reich : The role of Arnold Sommerfeld in the discussion about vector calculation, represented using the sources in the estate of the mathematician Rudolf Mehmke.
  2. ↑ Honorary doctoral students of the TH / TU Dresden. Technical University of Dresden, accessed on February 4, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Mehmke, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Lauterberg in the Harz Mountains
DATE OF DEATH November 16, 1944
Place of death Stuttgart