Jakob Hermann

Jakob Hermann was a Swiss mathematician who worked on problems in classical mechanics, born in Basel on 16 July 1678 and dead there on 11 July 1733. He took his mathematical training from Jacob Bernoulli at the University of Basel, graduated in 1695 and gained a master's degree in 1696 by defending a dissertation on infinite series. Bernoulli thought him the best of his many students, and after Bernoulli's death in 1705 Leibniz asked him to write the obituary for the Acta Eruditorum. He joined the Berlin Academy in 1701, held a chair of mathematics at Padua from 1707, moved to Frankfurt an der Oder in 1713 and to St. Petersburg in 1724, where he worked with Daniel Bernoulli. His Phoronomia of 1716 is an early treatise on mechanics in Latin, he was apparently the first to show that the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector is conserved under an inverse-square central force, and in 1729 he showed that loci are as easy to graph in polar as in Cartesian coordinates.