Caspar Wessel

Caspar Wessel ( born June 8, 1745 in Jonsrud, Vestby, † March 25, 1818 in Copenhagen ) was a Norwegian- Danish mathematician and surveyor.

After attending school in Oslo, he went to the University of Copenhagen to study law. For financial reasons, but he broke off and this was in 1764 the Danish cartographer Survey Commission, which at that time operated a comprehensive survey project. Even if he still acquired in 1778 the degree of " candidatus juris ", he remained all his life a surveyor. 1796 Survey of Denmark was completed.

1797 ranged Wessel at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences his only mathematical work entitled "On Directiones analytiske betegning " (On the analytical representation of direction ), which was published in 1799. This Wessel suggested independently by Jean Robert Argand before the geometric interpretation of complex numbers as points in the plane. Her work has long remained unnoticed. Only a work of Carl Friedrich Gauss on quadratic residues from 1831 helped this interpretation breakthrough.

1805 Caspar Wessel retired.