Georg Scheffers studied at Leipzig from 1884 to 1888 obtaining his doctorate in 1890. From 1896 he lectured at Darmstadt becoming a full professor there in 1900. In 1907 he was appointed to Charlottenburg where he held the chair of mathematics until he retired in 1935.
Lie was at Leipzig from 1886 until 1896 and he greatly influenced Scheffers' work. Lie suggested the topic for his doctoral thesis on plane contact transformations and also the topic for his Habilitationsschrift on complex number systems.
Scheffers' most important work, also inspired by Lie, was a paper in 1903 on Abel's theorem.
Later in life Scheffers wrote many popular mathematics textbooks and edited Lie's works.
His favourite topic was differential geometry and here he discovered many properties of particular curves and surfaces. He was an outstanding writer on his subject giving many excellent accounts of his work.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
December 1996