Christian Kramp

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Christian Kramp's father was a teacher in the Gymnasium at Strasbourg. Kramp studied medicine and, after graduating, practised medicine in the region around where he lived travelling to patients in a fairly wide area. However his interests certainly ranged outside medicine for, in addition to a number of medical publications, he published a work on crystallography in 1793.

In 1795 France annexed the Rhineland region in which Kramp was carrying out his medical work and after this he became a teacher at Cologne, teaching mathematics, chemistry and physics.

Kramp was appointed professor of mathematics at Strasbourg, the town of his birth, in 1809. He was elected to the geometry section of the Académie des Sciences in 1817.

As Bessel, Legendre and Gauss did, Kramp worked on the generalised factorial function which applied to non-integers. His work on factorials is independent of that of Stirling and Vandermonde. He did achieve one "first" in that he was the first to use the notation n! although he seems not to be remembered today for this widely used mathematical notation.

Kramp sent his work on factorials of non-integers to Bessel who was influenced by it.

Among Kramp's other work was a paper on crystallography and some quite important work on double refraction. He also wrote a number of elementary treatises on pure mathematics.

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

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JOC/EFR © February 1997 Copyright information	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
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