Ferdinand Karl Schweikart

Ferdinand Karl Schweikart (1780 to 1857) was a German jurist and amateur mathematician who developed an astral geometry before the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. The son of an attorney in Hesse, he studied law at the University of Marburg from 1796, where he also attended lectures by the mathematics professor J. K. F. Hauff, and he received a doctorate in law at Jena in 1798. After practising as a lawyer in Erbach and tutoring a young Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen prince, he became a professor of jurisprudence at Giessen, Kharkiv, Marburg and finally Konigsberg. He is best remembered for mathematics: in 1807 he published a work on the theory of parallel lines proposing that they be banished from geometry, and in 1818 he wrote to Gauss through his student Christian Ludwig Gerling about astral geometry, in which the angles of a triangle sum to less than 180 degrees. He influenced the work of his nephew Franz Taurinus.