Karl Rohn

Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Rohn (1855 to 1920) was a German geometer who began in engineering at Darmstadt and turned to pure mathematics at Leipzig and Munich. Under the guidance of Felix Klein he took his doctorate in 1878 with a study of the Kummer surface and its link to hyperelliptic functions, and he went on to hold professorships at Dresden and then Leipzig, where he stayed until his death. He built models of surfaces and space curves, won the 1886 Jablonowski Society prize for an essay on surfaces of order four, and became known for work on real algebraic curves and surfaces, including the arrangement of ovals on sextic curves, which interested David Hilbert. With Erwin Papperitz he wrote a widely used textbook of descriptive geometry.