Name Jakob Hermann | Role Mathematician | |
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Died July 11, 1733, Basel, Switzerland | ||
Jakob Hermann (16 July 1678 – 11 July 1733) was a mathematician who worked on problems in classical mechanics. He is the author of Phoronomia, an early treatise on Mechanics. In 1729, he proclaimed that it was as easy to graph a locus on the polar coordinate system as it was to graph it on the Cartesian coordinate system.
He appears to have been the first to show that the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector is a constant of motion for particles acted upon by an inverse-square central force.
Hermann was born and died in Basel. He received his initial training from Jacob Bernoulli and graduated with a degree in 1695. He became a member of the Berlin Academy in 1701. He was appointed to a chair in mathematics in Padua in 1707, but moved to Frankfurt an der Oder in 1713, and thence to St. Petersburg in 1724. Finally, he returned to Basel in 1731 to take a chair in ethics and natural law.
Hermann was elected to the Academie Royale des Sciences (Paris) in 1733, the year of his death.
Hermann was a distant relative of Leonhard Euler.