Elwin Bruno Christoffel

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Elwin Bruno Christoffel (born November 10, 1829 in Montjoie, now called Monschau; died March 15, 1900 in Strasbourg) was a German mathematician and physicist.

[edit] Life

Christoffel attended the Jesuit Gymnasium and Friedrich-Wilhelms Gymnasium in Cologne and studied at the University of Berlin with Dirichlet, among others, where he received a doctorate in 1856 for a thesis on the motion of electricity in homogeous bodies. In 1859, Christoffel became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. In 1862 he was appointed to a chair at the Polytechnic School in Zurich left vacant by Dedekind. After moving to the Gewerbeakademie in Berlin (now part of the Technical University of Berlin) in 1869, Christoffel became a professor at the University of Strasbourg in 1872, where he remained until retiring in 1894.

[edit] Work

Christoffel worked on conformal maps, potential theory, invariant theory, tensor analysis, mathematical physics, geodesy, and shock waves. The Christoffel symbol and Schwarz-Christoffel mapping are named after him.

[edit] References

• O'Connor, John J. & Robertson, Edmund F., “Elwin Bruno Christoffel”, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive 
• Elwin Bruno Christoffel at the Mathematics Genealogy Project