Julius Weisbach

Julius Ludwig Weisbach (1806 to 1871) was a German mathematician and engineer who spent his career at the mining academy in Freiberg, Saxony. Born in Mittelschmiedeberg, he studied at the Bergakademie from 1822 to 1826 and then with Carl Friedrich Gauss in Göttingen and Friedrich Mohs in Vienna. From 1836 he was professor of applied mathematics, mechanics, the theory of mountain machines and mine surveying, and was a popular teacher of field surveying, geometry and their applications. His textbook on engineering and machine mechanics was reprinted many times between 1845 and 1863. He was the first to develop a method for solving orthogonal linear regression problems, studied steam engines, thermodynamics and hydraulics, and refined the Darcy equation into the Darcy-Weisbach equation still widely used. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1868.