Christian Ludwig Gerling

Christian Ludwig Gerling was a German mathematician born in Hamburg in 1788, the son of a pastor of the same name at St. James's Church. He attended the Johanneum in Hamburg and then studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen, where he took his doctorate in 1812 with a thesis on orthographic projection applied to parallax calculations. In 1817 he became professor of mathematics at the University of Marburg. He is notable for his work on geodetics, and some sixty letters exchanged between him and Gauss on the subject were published in 1927. He is also remembered as the doctoral advisor of Julius Plücker.