Rehuel Lobatto

Rehuel Lobatto ( born June 6 1797 in Amsterdam, † February 9, 1866 in Delft ) was a Dutch mathematician.

Lobatto came from a Marrano family ( originally derived from Portugal Jews ): his father was the realtors Isaac Cohen Lobatto, his mother Rebecca Da Costa. He showed as a child a talent for mathematics and was a student of JH van Swinden at Athenaeum in Amsterdam ( 1811 ), and a student of Adolphe Quetelet in Brussels, with whom he corresponded, under whose influence he turned to the statistics and the he edited the Correspondance Mathématique et Physique. As a Jew, he could not be mathematics lecturer in the Netherlands at the time, but received in 1816 a position in the Ministry of Interior. He was also an advisor to the Ministry of Weights and Measures in 1831 and Secretary of the Commission of the first statistical Netherlands. In 1842 he became professor of mathematics at the newly founded Royal Academy in Delft.

He also wrote textbooks from 1828 to 1849 and was the official statistical yearbook in the Netherlands out. In 1841 he became a member of a state restructuring commission. He was also advisor to the government for life insurance ( a then new field of business in the Netherlands, 1807, the first life insurance company had ) and a life insurance company, after he published in 1830 a book about it.

He is well known for the Gauss - Lobatto methods in numerical integration (see also Runge- Kutta methods ). Lobatto 1827 improved the width determination method of Cornelis Douwes for sailors.

He was a knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and an honorary doctorate in Groningen (1834 ). He was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and an active member of Wiskundig Genootschap.

In 1825 he married Clara de Léon, with whom he had 10 children, of whom four survived him.

Writings

• Lessen over de Hoogere algebra, 1845