Sebastian Finsterwalder

Sebastian Finsterwalder ( born October 4, 1862 in Rosenheim, † December 4, 1951 in Munich) was a Bavarian mathematician and surveyor.

Finsterwalder was forty years, from 1891 to 1931, professor of the Technical University of Munich.

As a mountaineer, he began - presumably by the road noticed alpine fossils - to be interested in geology and structure of the Alps. The desire for accurate, but also less costly motion measurements on glaciers led him to glaciological applications of photogrammetry and in the Higher Geodesy. Finsterwalder led in 1892 by the first complete recording of the Bavarian glacier in Wettersteingebirge and the Berchtesgaden Alps.

Finsterwalder developed one of the first a method for reconstructing three-dimensional objects from photographic images measured, but at the same time he was also a pioneer in geodetic measurements in the high mountains, in particular by its Aerial photographs of the balloon from. Under his leadership, the Bavarian Commission for International Geodesy resulted in large parts of Bavaria by precise gravity measurements with relative gravimeters.

In his honor, was a high school Rosenheim, the Finsterwalder -Gymnasium, named after him. In 1915 he was president of the German Mathematical Society. 1943 Finsterwalder was awarded the Helmert commemorative coin of the German Association of Surveying.

In the same department had his two sons

• Richard Finsterwalder (1899-1963) - as Professor in Hanover and at the Technical University Munich
• Ulrich Finsterwalder (1897-1988) - as a civil engineer.