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Simon Spitzer

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Simon Spitzer
Spitzer and his family's grave at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Vienna
Born(1826-02-03)3 February 1826
Died2 April 1887(1887-04-02) (aged 61)
Resting placeOld Jewish Cemetery, Vienna
NationalityAustrian
Relatives
Scientific career
FieldsDifferential equations, analytical mechanics, financial mathematics
Institutions

Simon Spitzer (3 February 1826 – 2 April 1887)[2] was an Austrian mathematician, whose work largely focused on the integration of differential equations.[3] He was active as a writer in his field and, in addition to several independent works, published a large number of mathematical treatises in scholarly journals.[4]

Biography

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Spitzer was born in Vienna into a Jewish family originating from Nikolsburg, Moravia.[5]

He studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, from which he graduated in 1850, and became in 1851 privatdozent at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. In 1857 he was appointed professor of algebra at the Vienna Handelsschule, which position he held until 1887, at the same time lecturing at the Polytechnic, where he became assistant professor of analytic mechanics in 1863, and professor in 1870. When the Handelsschule was changed into the Handelsakademie Spitzer became its first rector (1872–73). From 1871 he was one of the directors of the private Österreichischen Hypotheken-Bank and a trusted advisor to the world of finance and commerce.[1]

Spitzer was known for his irritable nature, and became involved in scientific disputes—most notably with Joseph Petzval[6][7]—as the battleground for which he chose political newspapers as opposed to scholarly practice.[8]

His granddaughter was writer Leonie Adele Spitzer.[9]

Bibliography

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References

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 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainSinger, Isidore; Haneman, Frederick T. (1905). "Spitzer, Simon". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 525.

  1. ^ a b Pesditschek, M. (2007). "Spitzer, Simon" (PDF). Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon (in German). Vol. 13. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. p. 43. doi:10.1553/0X00284CEE.
  2. ^ Killy, Walther; Vierhaus, Rudolf, eds. (2005). "Spitzer, Simon". Dictionary of German National Biography. Vol. 9. Munich: K. G. Saur. ISBN 978-3-598-23299-2.
  3. ^ Bobynin, V. V. (1900). Спитцер, Симон [Spitzer, Simon]. Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (in Russian). Vol. 31. pp. 264–265.
  4. ^ "Spitzer, Simon". Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich (in German). Vol. 36. 1878. pp. 196–199.
  5. ^ Fraser, Craig (2018). "The Culture of Research Mathematics in 1860s Prussia: Adolph Myer and the Theory of the Second Variation in the Calculus of Variations". In Zack, Maria; Schlimm, Dirk (eds.). Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics: The CSHPM 2017 Annual Meeting in Toronto, Ontario. Proceedings of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics. Springer. p. 130. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90983-7. ISBN 978-3-319-90983-7.
  6. ^ Deakin, Michael A. B. (1981). "The Development of the Laplace Transform, 1737–1937: I. Euler to Spitzer, 1737–1880". Archive for History of Exact Sciences. 25 (4): 343–390. doi:10.1007/BF01395660. JSTOR 41133637. S2CID 117913073.
  7. ^ Deakin, Michael A. B. (1994). "The Laplace transform". In Grattan-Guiness, Ivor (ed.). Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences. Vol. 1. London: Routledge. p. 554. doi:10.4324/9780203014585. ISBN 978-0-203-01458-5.
  8. ^ Cantor, Moritz (1893). "Spitzer, Simon". Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Vol. 35. p. 223.
  9. ^ Korotin, Ilse, ed. (2016). biografıA. Lexikon österreichischer Frauen (in German). Vol. 3. Vienna: Böhlau. pp. 3124–3125. doi:10.26530/oapen_611232. ISBN 978-3-205-79590-2.