1804-1851

German Mathematician

Karl Jacobi made his most notable contributions to mathematics in the area of elliptic functions. His book Concerning the Structure and Properties of Determinants was an important work in that branch of mathematics, and his work on partial differential equations proved important in the formulation of quantum mechanics.

Jacobi was born into a relatively prosperous family in Potsdam, Germany, in 1804. His father was a banker, assuring Jacobi a good education as a child and, later, at the University of Berlin. He completed his Ph.D. at Berlin in 1825, then taught mathematics at the University of Königsberg from 1826 until 1844.

Jacobi's main area of interest was in the branch of mathematics that dealt with elliptic functions. These functions were first studied in the mid-seventeenth century when mathematicians began investigating ways to determine the length of an arc of arbitrary length...