Wilhelm Fiedler

Otto Wilhelm Fiedler was a German-Swiss mathematician, born in Chemnitz in 1832 and died in Zurich in 1912, known for his textbooks of geometry and his contributions to descriptive geometry. He was the son of a shoemaker, attended the Royal Mercantile College in Chemnitz and the Bergakademie Freiberg, and worked as a mathematics teacher while educating himself without attending a university. In 1858 he obtained his doctorate at the University of Leipzig under August Ferdinand Möbius. He became known for editing the German translation of George Salmon's textbooks of analytic, projective and algebraic geometry, which were called Salmon-Fiedler in the nineteenth century, and he was a member of the Leopoldina and of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.