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Ernst Kummer

Ernst Kummer
ErnstKummer.jpg
Ernst Eduard Kummer
Born (1810-01-29)29 January 1810
Sorau, Prussia
Died 14 May 1893(1893-05-14) (aged 83)
Berlin, Brandenburg, Germany
Residence Germany
Nationality Prussian
Fields Mathematician
Institutions University of Berlin
University of Breslau
Gewerbeinstitut
Lomonosov University
Alma mater University of Halle (Ph.D., 1831)
Thesis De cosinuum et sinuum potestatibus secundum cosinus et sinus arcuum multiplicium evolvendis (1831/1832)
Doctoral advisor Heinrich Scherk
Doctoral students Gotthold Eisenstein
Georg Frobenius
Lazarus Fuchs
Wilhelm Killing
Adolf Kneser
Franz Mertens
Hermann Schwarz
Georg Cantor
Hans Carl Friedrich von Mangoldt
Adolf Piltz
Known for Bessel functions, Kummer theory, Kummer surface, and other contributions

Ernst Eduard Kummer (29 January 1810 – 14 May 1893) was a German mathematician. Skilled in applied mathematics, Kummer trained German army officers in ballistics; afterwards, he taught for 10 years in a gymnasium, the German equivalent of high school, where he inspired the mathematical career of Leopold Kronecker.

Kummer was born in Sorau, Brandenburg (then part of Prussia). He was awarded a PhD from the University of Halle in 1831 for writing a prize-winning mathematical essay (De cosinuum et sinuum potestatibus secundum cosinus et sinus arcuum multiplicium evolvendis), which was eventually published a year later.

Kummer was married in 1840 to Ottilie Mendelssohn, daughter of Nathan Mendelssohn and Henriette Itzig. Ottilie was a cousin of Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Rebecca Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the wife of the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet. His second wife (whom he married soon after the death of Ottilie in 1848), Bertha Cauer, was a maternal cousin of Ottilie. Overall, he had 13 children. His daughter Marie married the mathematician Hermann Schwarz. Kummer retired from teaching and from mathematics in 1890 and died three years later in Berlin.

Kummer made several contributions to mathematics in different areas; he codified some of the relations between different hypergeometric series, known as contiguity relations. The Kummer surface results from taking the quotient of a two-dimensional abelian variety by the cyclic group {1, −1} (an early orbifold: it has 16 singular points, and its geometry was intensively studied in the nineteenth century).


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