Jacobi, Carl Gustav Jacob

Jacobi, Carl Gustav Jacob (kärl goos'täf yä'kôp yäkô'bē) [key], 1804–51, German mathematician. He was an outstanding teacher and was professor of mathematics at Königsberg (1827–42) and lectured at Berlin from 1844. One of the greatest algorists of all time, he is noted for his work on elliptic functions, described in his Fundamenta Nova Theoriae Functionum Ellipticarum (1829), and on determinants, the theory of numbers, differential equations, and dynamics. His brother, Moritz Hermann Jacobi,. 1801–74, was a physicist and engineer who was the more famous of the two during their lifetimes. He was known for his supposed discovery (1837) of galvanoplastics, but his reputation faded when his ideas were later shown to be mistaken.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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