Georg Scheffers

Georg Scheffers (21 November 1866 – 12 August 1945) was a German mathematician specializing in differential geometry. Scheffers was born on 21 November 1866 in the village of Altendorf near Holzminden (today incorporated into Holzminden). Scheffers began his university career at the University of Leipzig where he studied with Felix Klein and Sophus Lie. Scheffers was a coauthor with Lie for three of the earliest expressions of Lie theory: Lectures on Differential equations with known Infinitesimal transformations (1893), Lectures on Continuous groups (1893), and Geometry of Contact Transformations (1896). All three are now available online through archive.org. In 1896 Scheffers became docent at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where he was raised to professor in 1900. From 1907 to 1935, when he retired, Scheffers was a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1901–1902 he published a famous two-volume textbook entitled Anwendung der Differential- und Integralrechnung auf die Geometrie (application of differential and integral calculus to geometry). The first volume subtitled Einführung in die Theorie der Curven in der Ebene und in Raum was published in 1901 and dealt with curves. The second volume subtitled Einführung in die Theorie der Flächen (introduction to the theory of surfaces) was published in 1902. A second edition was published in 1910 (volume 2, 1913), and a third edition in 1922. In 1907 Scheffers published the first two volumes of his extensive revision and rewriting of Georg Bohlmann's 1897–1899 revision of Harnack's 1884 German translation of Serret's famous two-volume Cours de calcul différentiel et intégral, which was first published by Gauthier-Villars in 1868. In 1909 Scheffers published the third and last volume of his rewriting of Bohlman's version of Serret's two-volume work. For a new edition, Scheffers added an appendix with 46 pages of historical notes for the first and second volumes. Another very successful book was prepared for students of science and technology: Lehrbuch der Mathematik (textbook of mathematics).