Siegmund Günther

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

Adam Günther
Rector of the Technical University of Munich
In office 1987–1995
Preceded by	Moritz Schröter
Succeeded by	Heinrich von Schmidt
Personal details
Born	6 February 1848 Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria
Died	3 February 1923 (aged 74) Munich, Weimar Republic
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Thesis	Studien zur theoretischen Photometrie (1872)

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 was rector from 1911 to 1913.[1]

His mathematical work[1] included works on the determinant, hyperbolic functions, and parabolic logarithms and trigonometry.[2]

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

• Josef Reindl: Siegmund Günther. Nürnberg 1908 (online copy at the Univ. Heidelberg, German)
• Joseph Hohmann (1966), "Günther, Adam Wilhelm Siegmund", Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) (in German), 7, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 266–267; (full text online)

References

1. "Adam Wilhelm Siegmund Günther Biography". www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk. School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland. Retrieved 4 July 2015.
2. 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.