Karl Heinrich Gräffe

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Karl Gräffe's father was Dietrich Heinrich Gräffe, a jeweller, and his mother was Johanna Frederike Gräffe-Moritz. His parents were of modest means, and couldn't provide much of an education for their son, so Gräffe trained with a jeweller in Hamburg from 1813 to 1816 and he thought that he might become a goldsmith. However he was determined to find a way into education and a lot of hard work saw him manage to pass the entrance examinations of the Carolineum at Brunswick. Of course he needed funding to enable him to study at the College and his performance was good enough to see him awarded a scholarship. He was now in a position to profit from a quality education, and now there was no way that he was going to be a goldsmith. He set his sights high.

In 1824 Gräffe went to Göttingen where he attended lectures by Gauss and Thibaut. While in Göttingen, Gräffe wrote a prize winning dissertation. He became a lecturer at the Technical Institute in Zurich in 1828, becoming professor at the Oberen Industrieschule in 1833. The University of Zurich was founded by J K Orelli in 1833 and Laurenz Oken became the first rector. Gräffe taught there as a privatdozent from 1833, becoming an extraordinary professor at the University of Zurich in 1860.

Gräffe is best remembered for his method of numerical solution of algebraic equations, developed to answer a prize question of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. It is particularly suitable for methods developed for using computers to solve mathematical problems. This method is today called the Dandelin-Gräffe method after the two mathematicians who independently investigated it. The history of the Dandelin-Gräffe method is discussed in [3] and [5]. Lobachevsky is also credited with the independent discovery of the method which appears in his little-known book on algebra.

Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

JOC/EFR © August 2006 Copyright information	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
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