Enno Dirksen

Enno Dirksen (1788 to 1850) was a German mathematician who spent his working life at the University of Berlin. Born in Eilsum, then part of Prussia, he was taught mathematics, physics, astronomy and navigation by a teacher at the Emden Navigation School between 1803 and 1807, and afterwards taught in village schools at Hatzum and Hinte. On the suggestion of Jabbo Oltmanns he enrolled at Göttingen in 1817 and took his doctorate there, advised by Johann Tobias Mayer and Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut. He moved to Berlin in 1820, worked with the astronomer Johann Elert Bode, habilitated in the mathematics department as an expert in astronomy, and was made extraordinary professor that August and full professor of mathematics in June 1824. Among the students he advised was Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. He was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1825, retired because of illness in 1848 or 1849, and died in Paris in 1850.