Jakob Steiner

Jakob Steiner was a Swiss mathematician who worked primarily in geometry, born on 18 March 1796 in the village of Utzenstorf in the Canton of Bern. At 18 he became a pupil of Heinrich Pestalozzi and afterwards studied at Heidelberg, then earned his living by tutoring in Berlin, where he became acquainted with A. L. Crelle, who founded his famous Journal in 1826. After the publication of his Systematische Entwickelungen in 1832 he received an honorary degree at Königsberg through Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, and through the influence of Jacobi and the brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt a new chair of geometry was founded for him at Berlin in 1834, which he occupied until his death in Bern on 1 April 1863. He treated geometry synthetically, to the total exclusion of analysis.