Jakob Rosanes

Jakob Rosanes was a German mathematician and chess master, born in Brody in 1842 and died in Breslau in 1922, who worked on algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He began as a clerk in a mercantile house and studied chemistry before turning to mathematics, and he received his doctorate at the University of Breslau in 1865 under Heinrich Schroeter. He became a Privatdozent in 1870, a full professor in 1876, and remained at Breslau for the rest of his career, serving as rector in 1903 and 1904. In 1870 he gave a demonstration that each plane Cremona transformation factors into quadratic transformations, a result Max Noether reached independently at about the same time. Among his doctoral students were Ernst Steinitz and Otto Toeplitz, and Max Born later said that Rosanes's lectures on matrices were important to his own development.