Ernst Schröder (mathematician)

Ernst Schröder was a German mathematician born on 25 November 1841 in Mannheim, who died in Karlsruhe on 16 June 1902. He studied at Heidelberg, where he read mathematics under Otto Hesse, physics under Gustav Kirchhoff and chemistry under Robert Bunsen, and he received his doctorate there in 1862 with a thesis on star polygons in geometry. After two years at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt he moved in 1876 to the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, where he stayed for the rest of his career. His best known work is the three volume Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, published between 1890 and 1905, a detailed account of algebraic logic that developed Charles Peirce's calculus of relations and later gave Alfred Tarski a source for the modern algebraic theory. His work on ordered sets and ordinal numbers is also fundamental, although his contribution was recognised fully only in the early twentieth century.