Karl von Staudt

Karl Georg Christian von Staudt was a German mathematician who used synthetic geometry to provide a foundation for arithmetic, born on 24 January 1798 in the Free Imperial City of Rothenburg, now Rothenburg ob der Tauber. He attended the University of Göttingen from 1818 to 1822, where he studied with Gauss, and earned his doctorate from the University of Erlangen in 1822 for accomplishments in astronomy, including an ephemeris for the orbits of Mars and the asteroid Pallas. He began his career as a secondary school instructor in Würzburg until 1827 and then in Nuremberg until 1835. His book Geometrie der Lage, published in 1847, was a landmark in projective geometry. He died on 1 June 1867.