Heinrich Scherk

Heinrich Ferdinand Scherk (27 October 1798 to 4 October 1885) was a German mathematician best known for his work on minimal surfaces and for his contributions to the study of how the prime numbers are distributed. Born in Posen, he studied at Breslau and then with the astronomer Friedrich Bessel at Königsberg, took his doctorate at Berlin in 1823 and went on to hold professorships at Halle and Kiel. In 1831 he won a prize of the Jablonowsky Society for an essay on a surface defined by a partial differential equation, and in the same period he found the minimal surfaces now called Scherk's surfaces, the third non-trivial example of a minimal surface after the catenoid and the helicoid. His doubly periodic surface was the first complete, embedded, doubly periodic minimal surface. At Halle he supervised the doctorate of Ernst Kummer. He was dismissed from Kiel in 1852 for political reasons and spent the rest of his career in Bremen, teaching at the commercial school and giving popular lectures on astronomy.