Alfred Enneper

Alfred Enneper was a German mathematician, born in Barmen on 14 June 1830 and died in Hanover on 24 March 1885. He took his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1856 under Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, with a dissertation on functions of complex arguments, and habilitated there in 1859. From 1870 he held an extraordinary professorship at Göttingen. His best known work concerns minimal surfaces, surfaces of locally least area: in 1864 he gave an explicit parametrization of the minimal surface that now bears his name, Enneper's minimal surface. As a contemporary of Karl Weierstrass he shared in the creation of a whole class of parametrizations of minimal surfaces, known today as the Enneper-Weierstrass parameterization. The source consulted records no prizes or further offices, and this entry states only what it supports.