Ferdinand Minding
Was a German -; Ernst Ferdinand Adolf Minding (then Russia, now Estonia † 1 Maijul / May 13 1885greg in Dorpat, born December 30, 1805jul / January 11 1806greg in Kalisz, then Prussia, now Poland. .. . ) Russian mathematician.
Life and work
As Minding was one year old, the family moved to Hirschberg in Silesia (then Prussia). After graduation in 1824, he studied in Halle and Berlin classics, philosophy and physics (mathematics only self-teaching ). After graduating in 1827, he was first an assistant teacher of mathematics, history and German at the high school in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal). During this time he wrote his doctoral thesis and was finally received his doctorate in 1829 in Halle with the work De valore intergralium duplicium quam proxime inveniendo. In November 1830 he was a lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin and in 1834 also at the Royal General Building School in Berlin. From 1843 he was a professor at Dorpat, where he also taught physics in addition to mathematics. 1851-1855 he was a faculty chairman. In 1864 he was admitted a Russian citizen and in the same year in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Following Carl Friedrich Gauss (whose treatise was published in 1828 ), he devoted himself to the differential geometry. In a work of 1830 he introduced the geodesic curvature, which was rediscovered independently by Pierre Ossian Bonnet 1848 ( corresponding investigations by Gauss in 1825 had this not published). In 1838 he examined on surfaces of revolution developable surfaces. He proved in 1839, the invariance surface deflection ( set of Minding ), that is, that land which locally have the same Gaussian curvature, locally unwound on each other, which was also proved by Bonnet later. He examined surfaces of constant Gaussian curvature and also gave examples pseudo- spherical surfaces ( constant negative curvature ) that have been explicitly by Eugenio Beltrami used as models of non-Euclidean geometry. In addition to differential geometry, he worked on integration of differential equations with integral factors ( he received in 1861 the Demidov Prize of the Academy of St. Petersburg), mechanics, continued fractions and abelian integrals. He also wrote several textbooks. In addition, he has published in 1849 one of the first integral tables. One obstacle was in his work on integrals and differential equations, that he did not deal with the then modern function theory. For this reason, the integral panel contains very few definite integrals.
He married in 1836 Auguste regulator and had with her a son and two daughters.
Writings
- Ferdinand Minding. Collection of integral tables to use for teaching at the Royal. General Building School and the Royal. Commercial Institute. Reimarus, Berlin, 1849. Online at Google Books.
- Ferdinand Minding. Handbook of differential and integral calculus and its applications to geometry and mechanics. First, for the use in lectures. F. Dümmler, Berlin, 1836.