Ludwig Adolf Sohncke
German mathematician
Ludwig Adolf Sohncke (20 June 1807 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), Kingdom of Prussia – 16 January 1853 in Halle, Kingdom of Prussia) was a German mathematician. He was father of the mathematician Leonhard Sohncke.
Life and work
Ludwig Adolf Sohncke studied at the Albertina University in his native town Königsberg, was doctoral student of Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. There he began his scientific career as a private lecturer in 1833. Together with Jacobi and Franz Ernst Neumann, he was co-founder and co-director of the Königsberg Seminar of Physics that aimed to install a more intensive and effective model for teaching Physics and mathematics. In this institution, Otto Hesse and Theodor Schönemann belonged to his students.
In 1835, he was appointed — by recommendation of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel — to the University of Halle as extraordinary professor of mathematics in succession of Julius Plücker, where he advanced to an ordinary professor in 1839. He worked with varied interests in analysis, mainly in the field of elliptic functions, where he made discoveries over the complex multiplication, further in geometry, mechanics, and history of mathematics. He translated the History of Geometry by Michel Chasles (1837) into the German language, and edited some of his analytic lectures. Seen as a whole, his list of publications is small; possible reasons could be difficult economic condition, since the payments for professors in Halle were low and often was not enough for their living, or a great burden of teaching, or a problem with alcohol.
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