Friedrich Julius Richelot

Friedrich Julius Richelot was a German mathematician, born in Königsberg on 6 November 1808 and died there on 31 March 1875. He was a student of Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, and he took his doctorate at the University of Königsberg in 1831 with a dissertation on dividing the circle into 257 equal parts. He remained at Königsberg as a professor, where he continued Jacobi's work on function theory in the same spirit and was the teacher who influenced Heinrich Schroeter most. His 1832 dissertation, published in Crelle's journal, is the first known guide to the Euclidean construction of the regular 257-gon with compass and straightedge. He published widely in German, French and Latin, and in 1825 he joined the student corps Masovia.