Alfred Clebsch

Alfred Clebsch
Rudolf Friedrich Alfred Clebsch
Born	19 January 1833(1833-01-19) Königsberg
Died	7 November 1872(1872-11-07) (aged 39) Göttingen
Nationality	Prussia
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	University of Königsberg
Doctoral advisor	Franz Ernst Neumann
Doctoral students	Gottlob Frege Alexander von Brill
Known for	Clebsch surface Clebsch–Gordan coefficients

Rudolf Friedrich Alfred Clebsch (19 January 1833 – 7 November 1872) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He attended the University of Königsberg and was habilitated at Berlin. He subsequently taught in Berlin and Karlsruhe. His collaboration with Paul Gordan in Giessen led to the introduction of Clebsch–Gordan coefficients for spherical harmonics, which are now widely used in quantum mechanics.

Together with Carl Neumann at Göttingen, he founded the mathematical research journal Mathematische Annalen in 1868.

In 1883 Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant translated Clebsch's work on elasticity into French and published it as Théorie de l'élasticité des Corps Solides.

Books by A. Clebsch

• Vorlesungen über geometrie (Teubner, Leipzig, 1876-1891) edited by Ferdinand Lindemann.
• Théorie der binären algebraischen Formen (Teubner, 1872)
• Theorie der Abelschen Functionen with P. Gordan (B. G. Teubner, 1866)
• Theorie der Elasticität fester Körper (B. G. Teubner, 1862)

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Alfred Clebsch", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Clebsch.html .
• Alfred Clebsch at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.