Ludwig August Seeber

Ludwig August Seeber (1793 to 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist from Karlsruhe, where he was also born and died. Little is known of his origins, but in 1810 he studied astronomy at Göttingen with Carl Friedrich Gauss, alongside Christian Ludwig Gerling, taught at the Karlsruhe cadet school from 1819 to 1822, took his doctorate at Freiburg in 1824 and was professor of physics there until 1834. He then held the physics chair at the Polytechnicum and Lyceum in Karlsruhe until retiring early in 1840. His 1824 work applied the idea of spherical particles in equilibrium to crystal structure, which Max von Laue called the earliest application of atomic theory to a purely physical problem. His 1831 book studied positive ternary quadratic forms, continuing Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae; he stated two lemmas but proved only one, and Gauss proved the other in his review of the book.