Franz Taurinus

Franz Adolph Taurinus (15 November 1794 to 13 February 1874) was a German mathematician known for his work on non-Euclidean geometry. He was the son of Julius Ephraim Taurinus, a court official of the Count of Erbach-Schönberg, and Luise Juliane Schweikart. He studied law at Heidelberg, Gießen and Göttingen and lived as a private scholar in Cologne. He corresponded about mathematics, among other things, with his uncle Ferdinand Karl Schweikart, a law professor in Königsberg, who examined a model after Saccheri and Lambert in which the parallel postulate fails and the angles of a triangle sum to less than two right angles, now called hyperbolic geometry. Schweikart never published this work, which he called astral geometry, but sent a short summary of its principles to Taurinus.