Gotthold Eisenstein facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Gotthold Eisenstein
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Gotthold Eisenstein
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| Born | 16 April 1823 Berlin, Prussia
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| Died | 11 October 1852 (aged 29) Berlin, Prussia
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| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | University of Berlin |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Doctoral advisor | Ernst Eduard Kummer Nikolaus Wolfgang Fischer |
Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein (born April 16, 1823 – died October 11, 1852) was a German mathematician. He was very good at number theory (the study of numbers) and analysis (a branch of math dealing with change). He even found solutions to problems that the famous mathematician Gauss couldn't solve.
Like other brilliant mathematicians, Galois and Abel, Eisenstein died very young, before he was 30. He was born and passed away in Berlin, Prussia.
Contents
Early Life and Learning
Gotthold's parents, Johann Konstantin Eisenstein and Helene Pollack, were from Jewish families. They became Protestants before he was born. From a young age, Gotthold showed a great talent for both math and music. He learned to play the piano when he was little and kept playing and writing music his whole life.
He often had health problems. As a baby, he got meningitis, a serious brain infection. This illness had already taken the lives of all five of his brothers and sisters.
In 1837, when he was 14, he started school at Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. Soon after, he went to Friedrich Werder Gymnasium. His teachers quickly saw how talented he was in math. By the time he was 15, he had already learned everything the school could teach him in math. He then started studying differential calculus on his own. This is a type of math that helps understand how things change. He learned it from the books of famous mathematicians like Leonhard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.
When he was 17, Eisenstein started attending classes at the University of Berlin. He was still a student in high school at the time! In 1842, before finishing his final exams, he went to England with his mother to find his father. In 1843, he met William Rowan Hamilton in Dublin. Hamilton gave him a book about Niels Henrik Abel's proof. This proof showed that some very complex math problems (fifth-degree polynomials) could not be solved in a simple way. This book made Eisenstein even more interested in doing his own math research.
Five Amazing Years of Math
In 1843, Eisenstein came back to Berlin. He passed his final exams and started at the University that autumn. By January 1844, he had already shown his first math paper to the Berlin Academy. This paper was about "cubic forms" in math.
That same year, he met Alexander von Humboldt for the first time. Humboldt later became a very important helper for Eisenstein. He helped Eisenstein get money from the King, the government, and the Berlin academy. This money was important because Eisenstein was very poor. Even though the money was often late, Eisenstein earned it by working incredibly hard. In 1844 alone, he published over 23 math papers and two problems in a famous math magazine called Crelle's Journal. These included new ways to prove the law of quadratic reciprocity, and similar laws for "cubic" and "quartic" numbers.
In June 1844, Eisenstein visited Carl Friedrich Gauss in Göttingen. Gauss was one of the greatest mathematicians ever. In 1845, another mathematician named Kummer helped Eisenstein get an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau. Jacobi, another important mathematician, also supported this honor. However, Jacobi and Eisenstein later had disagreements about who discovered certain math ideas first in 1846.
In 1847, Eisenstein became a professor at the University of Berlin. He started teaching classes there. Even the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann attended his classes on elliptic functions.
Challenges and Early Death
In 1848, Eisenstein was briefly put in prison by the Prussian army. This was because of his support for revolutionary ideas in Berlin. Eisenstein believed in a more democratic government. While he didn't actively fight in the revolution of 1848, he was arrested on March 19. He was released just one day later. But the harsh way he was treated made his already weak health even worse. Because he was linked to the revolution, he lost his official payments, even though Alexander von Humboldt tried hard to defend him.
Even with his health problems, Eisenstein kept writing important math papers. These papers were about how prime numbers can be divided and about reciprocity laws. In 1851, because Gauss suggested it, Eisenstein was chosen to be a member of the Academy of Göttingen. One year later, Dirichlet suggested him, and he was also chosen for the Academy of Berlin.
Sadly, Gotthold Eisenstein died from tuberculosis when he was only 29 years old. Humboldt, who was 83 at the time, went with his body to the cemetery. Humboldt had just managed to get money for Eisenstein to go on a holiday to Sicily to get better, but it was too late.
A Famous Quote About Eisenstein
Gauss ... in conversation once remarked that, there had been only three epoch-making mathematicians: Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
You might have heard that Gauss once said there were only three "epoch-making" (meaning very important and game-changing) mathematicians: Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein. This quote is often repeated.
However, this isn't exactly what Gauss said himself. It comes from a book written in 1877 by Moritz Cantor, who was a student of Gauss. Cantor was remembering a conversation he had with Gauss many years before. He was summarizing what Gauss thought about Eisenstein.
Even if Gauss didn't put Eisenstein in the exact same group as Archimedes and Newton, his own writings show that Gauss thought very highly of Eisenstein. For example, in a letter from Gauss to Humboldt in 1846, Gauss said that Eisenstein's talent was something "nature bestows only a few times a century." This shows how much Gauss respected Eisenstein's mathematical genius.
See also
In Spanish: Ferdinand Eisenstein para niños
