Carl Neumann

Carl Gottfried Neumann, also written Karl, was a German mathematical physicist and professor, born in Königsberg on 7 May 1832 and died in Leipzig on 27 March 1925. He was the son of the physicist Franz Neumann, studied at Königsberg, and took his doctorate in 1856 under Friedrich Julius Richelot with a thesis applying hyperelliptic integrals to classical mechanics. He wrote his habilitation at Halle on the Faraday effect under Eduard Heine, then held chairs at Halle, Basel, Tübingen and, from 1868 until he retired in 1911, Leipzig. In 1868 he and Alfred Clebsch founded the research journal Mathematische Annalen. His work applied potential theory to physics and mathematics and sought to formalize electrodynamics and analytical mechanics; the Neumann boundary conditions and the Neumann series are named after him. He long favoured Weber's electrodynamics over Maxwell's equations and argued the point with Hermann von Helmholtz.