Gustav Conrad Bauer

Gustav Conrad Bauer (1820-1906) was a German mathematician who spent most of his career at the University of Munich. Born in Augsburg, he studied at Augsburg, Erlangen, Vienna and Berlin, took his doctorate at Berlin in 1842 under Dirichlet, and continued his studies in Paris under Liouville. After years as a private tutor in a princely household in what is now Romania, he became a Privatdozent at Munich in 1857, professor extraordinarius in 1865 and ordinarius in 1869, and professor emeritus in 1900. His research dealt with algebra, geometric problems, spherical harmonics, the gamma function and generalized continued fractions, and he is known for the Bauer-Muir transformation and Bauer's conic sections. He proved in 1859 a series formula that later impressed G. H. Hardy in Ramanujan's first letter. His doctoral students included Heinrich Burkhardt and Eduard Ritter von Weber.