Otto Hesse

Otto Hesse, whose full name was Ludwig Otto Hesse, was a German mathematician born in Königsberg, Prussia on 22 April 1811, who died in Munich on 4 August 1874. The son of a merchant and brewer, he studied mathematics and the natural sciences at the University of Königsberg, where his lecturers included Jacobi, Bessel, Carl Neumann and Richelot, and he took his doctorate there in 1840 under Jacobi's supervision with a thesis on the intersection points of three quadric surfaces. He became a privatdozent in 1841 and an extraordinary professor in 1845, then held chairs at Halle, at Heidelberg from 1856 and at the new Polytechnic in Munich from 1868. His main work developed the theory of algebraic functions and the theory of invariants. He is remembered particularly for introducing the Hessian determinant in 1842 and for the principle of transfer in projective geometry, and many students who became famous, among them Gustav Kirchhoff, Carl Neumann and Adolph Mayer, did their doctoral studies under his supervision.