biography
| name: |
Kummer, Ernst Eduard
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| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1810–93)
|
| biography:
| Mathematician, born in Sorau, E Germany. He studied at Halle, and taught at the Gymnasium (high school) in Liegnitz (1832–42). He was professor of mathematics at Wrocław, Poland (formerly Breslau, Prussia) (1842–55), and at Berlin from 1855. He added to the work of Gauss on the hypergeometric series, and worked in number theory. In trying to prove Pierre de Fermat's last theorem, he introduced ‘ideal numbers’, later developed by Richard Dedekind into one of the fundamental tools of modern algebra. He also developed the Kummer surface, the wave surface in four dimensional space. |
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