Caspar Wessel

Caspar Wessel (8 June 1745 to 25 March 1818) was a Danish-Norwegian mathematician and cartographer who in 1799 was the first person to describe the geometrical interpretation of complex numbers as points in the complex plane and as vectors. He was born at Jonsrud in Vestby, Akershus, in Norway, one of thirteen children of the pastor Jonas Wessel and Helene Marie Schumacher, and his brothers included Johan Herman Wessel. After finishing secondary school at Oslo Cathedral School in 1763 he went to Denmark, where he studied law at the University of Copenhagen for a year before financial pressure forced him to stop. To make a living he became an assistant land surveyor.