Major Developments in Mechanics

Abstract

The University of Göttingen in Göttingen, Germany had a tradition of outstanding mathematicians for much of the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Friedrich Gauss, Professor at Göttingen from 1807 to 1855. Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet succeeded Gauss in 1855; he was succeeded by George Friedrich Bernhard Riemann in 1859. Riemann taught at Göttingen until shortly before his death in 1866. Felix Klein arrived at Göttingen in 1886 and re-established Göttingen as the leading mathematics center in the world at the turn of the century. There can be no question that Klein’s emphasis on applied mathematics at Göttingen played a fundamental role in the establishment of mechanics as a separate discipline of engineering science.