Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus

Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651 to 1708) was a German mathematician, physicist, physician and philosopher. He is remembered in algebra for the Tschirnhaus transformation, which removes intermediate terms from an algebraic equation and was published in Acta Eruditorum in 1683. In 1682 he worked out the theory of catacaustics and showed that they could be rectified, and one catacaustic of the parabola still bears the name Tschirnhausen cubic. He was one of five mathematicians who answered Johann Bernoulli's 1696 brachistochrone challenge. He studied at Leiden, corresponded for life with Leibniz and exchanged letters with Spinoza, and he built a glassworks in Saxony that made burning glasses. Some writers credit him, rather than Johann Friedrich Boettger, with the first European porcelain.