Mathematician:Wilhelm Jordan

Mathematician

German geodeist who conducted surveys in Germany and Africa and founded the German geodesy journal.

Remembered for Gauss-Jordan elimination, a version of Gaussian elimination with improved stability, for minimizing the squared error in the sum of a series of surveying observations.

Nationality

German

History

• Born: 1 March 1842, Ellwangen, Württemberg
• Died: 17 April 1899, Hanover

Theorems and Definitions

• Gauss-Jordan Elimination (with Carl Friedrich Gauss)

Publications

• 1888: Textbook of Geodesy (3rd edition) (in which Gauss-Jordan elimination appears)

Sources

• 2008: David Nelson: The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (4th ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Gauss-Jordan elimination