Sebastian Finsterwalder

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Sebastian Finsterwalder

Sebastian Finsterwalder (born October 4, 1862 in Rosenheim , † December 4, 1951 in Munich ) was a Bavarian mathematician and geodesist .

For forty years, from 1891 to 1931, Finsterwalder was a full professor at the Technical University of Munich .

As a climber he began - presumably by the road remarked alpine fossils - for geology and structure of the Alps to care. The desire for precise, but also less complex movement measurements on glaciers led him to glaciological applications of photogrammetry and higher geodesy . In 1892, Finsterwalder carried out the first complete survey of the Bavarian glaciers in the Wetterstein Mountains and the Berchtesgaden Alps . One of his first works in this area was the photogrammetic construction he drew with a scale of 1: 10,000, which depicts Vernagtferner in the Ötztal in 1889.

Finsterwalder was one of the first to develop a method for the reconstruction of spatial objects from photographic measurement images , but at the same time he was also a pioneer in geodetic measurements in high mountains , in particular through his aerial photographs from a balloon . In 1899, Sebastian Finsterwalder, together with the engineer and private scholar Konrad von Bassus, built a photogrammetric apparatus for airship travel, which made it possible to determine the angle of the image from the balloon using a mirrored bubble level . Plumb lines that were also photographed later allowed conclusions to be drawn about the location of the balloon during the recording. At the beginning of the First World War, Finsterwalder constructed, like Theodor Scheimpflug in Austria before him , a correction device, a so-called "basic image judge", with the help of which precise position maps could be made from aerial photos. In addition, the Bavarian Commission for International Earth Surveying carried out precise gravity measurements with relative gravimeters in large parts of Bavaria under his leadership .

A high school in Rosenheim , the Sebastian-Finsterwalder-Gymnasium , was named after him in his honor. In 1915 he was president of the German Mathematicians Association . In 1943 Finsterwalder was awarded the Helmert commemorative coin of the German Association for Surveying . Since 1946 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

His two sons also worked in the same department

Together with his son Richard, he is the namesake for the Antarctic Finsterwalder Glacier .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bavarian Glaciers in Climate Change - a Status Report. Bavarian State Ministry for Environment and Health, Munich 2012, p. 21, available as PDF under Archived Copy ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bestellen.bayern.de
  2. ↑ Alexander Gall (Ed.): Constructing, Communicating, Presenting: Images of Science and Technology. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2007, p. 74.
  3. ↑ Otto von Gruber : S. Finsterwalder's share in the development of photogrammetry. In: Sebastian Finsterwalder on his 75th birthday on October 4, 1937. Wichmann-Verlag , Berlin 1937, p. 13.
  4. ↑ Sebastian Finsterwalder obituary at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (PDF file)


personal data
SURNAME Finsterwalder, Sebastian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bavarian mathematician and geodesist
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Rosenheim , Kingdom of Bavaria
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1951
Place of death Munich , Bavaria , Federal Republic of Germany