August Ferdinand Möbius

August Ferdinand Möbius (17 November 1790 to 26 September 1868) was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. Born in Schulpforta, he studied at the University of Leipzig and under Carl Friedrich Gauss at Göttingen, completed his doctoral thesis on the occultation of fixed stars at Halle in 1815, and in 1816 became extraordinary professor of astronomy and higher mechanics at Leipzig, where he died. He is best known for his discovery of the Möbius strip, a non-orientable surface with only one side, and was the first to introduce homogeneous coordinates into projective geometry. The Möbius function and Möbius inversion formula of number theory are also named after him.