Nicolas Fuss (29 January 1755 – 4 January 1826), also known as Nikolai Fuss, was a

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri * Swiss, North Carolina *Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses *Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports *Swiss Internation ...

mathematician, living most of his life in

Imperial Russia The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the List of Russian monarchs, Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended th ...

Biography

Fuss was born in Basel, Switzerland. He moved to Saint Petersburg to serve as a mathematical assistant to Leonhard Euler from 1773–1783, and remained there until his death. He contributed to spherical trigonometry, differential equations, the optics of microscopes and telescopes,

differential geometry Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multili ...

, and actuarial science. He also contributed to Euclidean geometry, including the problem of Apollonius. In 1797, he was elected a foreign member of the

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ( sv, Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) is one of the Swedish Royal Academies, royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special ...

. From 1800–1826, Fuss served as the permanent secretary to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1812. He died in St. Petersburg.

Family

Nicolas Fuss was married to Albertine Benedikte Philippine Luise Euler (1766-1822). Albertine Euler was the daughter of Leonhard Euler's eldest son Johann Albrecht Euler (1734-1800) and his wife Anna Sophie Charlotte Hagemeister. Pauline Fuss, a daughter of Nicolas and Albertine, married Russian chemist

Genrikh Struve Heinrich Wilhelm von Struve (russian: Генрих Васильевич Струве, tr. ; 10 July 1822 – 28 March 1908) was a Baltic German chemist from the Struve family and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Struve was born in ...

. Nicolas's son Paul Heinrich von Fuss (1798-1855) edited the first attempt at a collected works of

Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

. Paul Heinrich was a member of the

Academy of Sciences in Petersburg An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, ...

from 1823 and its secretary from 1826. Nicolas's son Georg Albert 1806–54), was from 1839 an astronomer in Pulowa and then from 1848 in Vilnius and also published on magnetism.

References

* , 2006 *

External links

MacTutor History of Mathematics
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Fuss, Nicolas 1755 births 1826 deaths 18th-century Swiss mathematicians Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Full members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences Swiss expatriates in Russia Russian people of Swiss descent 19th-century Swiss mathematicians 18th-century mathematicians from the Russian Empire 19th-century mathematicians from the Russian Empire Members of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala

Biography

Family

See also

References

External links