Adolph Göpel

Adolph Göpel ( born September 29, 1812 in Rostock, † June 7, 1847 in Berlin) was a German mathematician who became known primarily by a single posthumously published work on elliptic functions.

Life and work

He was born the son of a Saxon music teacher in Rostock, from whom he inherited a musical talent. Aged 10, he went with a maternal uncle, who was English Consul in Corsica, to Italy, where they were often on the road. The uncle tried to get him to be interested in science, and he heard the winter semesters 1825 and 1826 at the University of Pisa mathematics and physics. In 1827 he returned to Rostock, attended high school and in 1829 the University of Berlin, where he also philosophy, history and philology heard alongside mathematics and science. In 1835 he received his doctorate with a thesis on periodic continued fraction developments. It testifies Jacobian " of great ingenuity ". But in the next twelve years he wrote no work other than some small, " written with Spirit" ( as Jacobi ) Working 1843-5 mentioned for a magazine in Greifswald, such as Jacobi.

He is a teacher at the Friedrich Werder Gymnasium thereafter at the Royal Junior High School and is then librarian at the Royal Library ( in the Humboldt -Universität zu Berlin). He was friends with the Publisher August Crelle. With the Berlin mathematicians he had no contact with it.

In addition to his librarian, he worked on a major work on elliptic functions, more precisely about the inverse functions of Abelian integrals, the generalization of the elliptic integrals and associated functions to the case of higher genus g of the corresponding Riemann surfaces. Elliptical features correspond to g = 1, and are doubly periodic, the next higher " hyperelliptic " have functions g = 2 and are fourfold periodic functions. He gives them explicitly as fourfold periodic quotient of theta functions in two variables. Your squares provide the sought relations, which later turned out to be connected with the geometry of the Kummer surface. This breakthrough on the then most active and most competitive area of ​​mathematical research he succeeded ( in the Jacobi worked, among others ).

The work was Göpel Charles Hermite come, who was sent by Carl Gustav Jacobi. Hermite was in a letter to Jacobi, published in the Journal Crelle 1846, the solution of Göpel come very close, so that it decided to publish. A few weeks after the filing of March 1847 he died of a " short, painful " disease, Jacobi noticed yet that another mathematician came to the same results and filed a corresponding work. This is Johann Georg Rosenhain, who had in 1846 filed a prize essay in Paris, but the results already 1844-1847 Jacobi told in letters.