Siegmund Günther Explained

Adam Günther
Rector of the Technical University of Munich
Term Start:	1911
Term End:	1913
Predecessor:	Moritz Schröter
Birth Date:	6 February 1848
Birth Place:	Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria
Death Place:	Munich, Weimar Republic
Module:	Embed: yes Fields: Mathematics Thesis Title: Studien zur theoretischen Photometrie Thesis1 Title: and Thesis2 Title: )--> Thesis1 Url: and Thesis2 Url: )--> Thesis Year: 1872 Thesis1 Year: and Thesis2 Year: )--> Doctoral Advisors: )-->

Adam Wilhelm Siegmund Günther (6 February 1848 – 3 February 1923) was a German geographer, mathematician, historian of mathematics and natural scientist.

Early life

Born in 1848 to a German businessman, Günther would go on to attend several German universities including Erlangen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Berlin, and Göttingen.^[1]

Career

In 1872 he began teaching at a school in Weissenburg, Bavaria. He completed his habilitation thesis on continued fractions entitled Darstellung der Näherungswerte der Kettenbrüche in independenter Form in 1873. The next year he began teaching at Munich Polytechnicum. In 1876, he began teaching at a university in Ansbach where he stayed for several years before moving to Munich and becoming a professor of geography until he retired; he served as the university's rector from 1911 to 1913.^[1]

For some years, Günther was a member of the federal parliament, the Reichstag, and later the Bavarian parliament, representing liberal parties.^[2]

His mathematical work^[1] included works on the determinant, hyperbolic functions, and parabolic logarithms and trigonometry.^[3]

Publications (selection)

• Darstellung der Näherungswerthe der Kettenbrüche in independenter Form. Eduard Besold, Erlangen, 1873
• Vermischte Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Teubner, Leipzig, 1876
• Lehrbuch der Determinanten-Theorie für Studirende. Eduard Besold, Erlangen, 1877
• Die Lehre von den gewöhnlichen und verallgemeinerten Hyperbelfunktionen. Louis Nebert, Halle, 1881
  • Parabolische Logarithmen und parabolische Trigonometrie. Teubner, Leipzig, 1882

Further reading

• Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998.
• Josef Reindl: Siegmund Günther. Nürnberg 1908 (online copy at the Univ. Heidelberg, German)

Notes and References

1. Web site: Adam Wilhelm Siegmund Günther Biography. www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk. School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland. 4 July 2015.
2. Book: Daum. Wissenschaftspopularisierung. 326, 351, 385, 389, 489.
3. This is about connecting the rectified length of line segments along a parabola, giving logarithms for appropriate coordinates, and trigonometric values for suitable angles, in a similar way as the area under a hyperbola defines the natural logarithm, and a hyperbolic angle is defined via the area of a hyperbolically truncated triangle.