Ludwig Immanuel Magnus

Ludwig Immanuel Magnus (1790 to 1861) was a German Jewish mathematician who in 1831 published a paper on the inversion transformation, the idea that leads to inversive geometry. He came to mathematics through banking, studying Euclid while working in his uncle's bank, served as a gunner in the Napoleonic Wars from 1813 to 1815, and then returned to banking and teaching until 1834, when the founder of the academy where he taught died. His reputation was established by 1834 and the University of Bonn gave him an honorary doctorate. His papers appeared in Gergonne's Annales de mathematiques pures et appliquees and in Crelle's Journal, and he also contributed to Meier Hirsch's collection of geometrical problems and wrote a collection of problems and theorems in analytic geometry of space, published in 1837. He then spent nine years as head revenue officer of the Berliner Kassenverein, retiring in 1843.