Johann Christian Martin Bartels

Johann Christian Martin Bartels (1769 to 1836) was a German mathematician best known as the teacher of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Nikolai Lobachevsky. Born in Brunswick, the son of a pewterer, he became an elementary school assistant at fourteen and befriended the boy Gauss there, then studied at Helmstedt under Johann Friedrich Pfaff and at Göttingen under Abraham Gotthelf Kästner. After teaching in Switzerland and at Jena he accepted the chair of mathematics at Kazan State University in 1808, where he lectured on a wide range of pure and applied subjects and guided the student Lobachevsky, including through a history of mathematics course that turned Lobachevsky toward the problem of parallel lines. In 1821 he moved to Dorpat, now Tartu, where he founded a centre for differential geometry and remained until his death. He published little of his research, but his students recorded his results, among them the formulas for space curves now named for Frenet and Serret, and he was elected to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences.