Caspar Wessel
| Caspar Wessel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 8, 1745 Vestby |
| Died | March 25, 1818 (aged 72) Copenhagen |
| Nationality |
 Danish Norwegian
|
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Alma mater | University of Copenhagen |
| Known for |
Complex numbers Complex plane Vectors |
| Notable awards | Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog |
Caspar Wessel (June 8, 1745, Vestby – March 25, 1818, Copenhagen) was a Norwegian–Danish mathematician and cartographer. In 1799, Wessel was the first person to describe the geometrical interpretation of complex numbers as points in the complex plane. He was the younger brother of poet and playwright Johan Herman Wessel.
Wessel was born in Jonsrud, Vestby, Akershus, Norway and was one of thirteen children in a family. In 1763, having completed secondary school at Oslo Cathedral School, he went to Denmark for further studies. He attended the University of Copenhagen to study law, but due to financial pressures, could only do so for a year. To survive, he became an assistant land surveyor to his brother and they worked on the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters' topographical survey of Denmark. This was not enough, however, and he took on extra work as a cartographer. He worked as a surveyor for the rest of his life, stopping only for a sabbatical year in 1778 to finish his law degree. By 1798 had risen to the supervisory role of Royal Inspector of Surveying.
It was the mathematical aspect of surveying that led him to exploring the geometrical significance of complex numbers. His fundamental paper, Om directionens analytiske betegning, was presented in 1797 to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Since it was in Danish and published in a journal rarely read outside of Denmark, it went unnoticed for nearly a century. The same results were independently rediscovered by Argand in 1806 and Gauss in 1831.
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