Siegmund Günther

Adam Wilhelm Siegmund Günther (6 February 1848 – 3 February 1923) was a German geographer, mathematician, historian of mathematics and natural scientist.

Adam Günther
Rector of the Technical University of Munich
In office 1911–1913
Preceded by	Moritz Schröter
Succeeded by	Heinrich von Schmidt [de]
Personal details
Born	(1848-02-06)6 February 1848 Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria
Died	3 February 1923(1923-02-03) (aged 74) Munich, Weimar Republic
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Thesis	Studien zur theoretischen Photometrie  (1872)

Early life

Born in 1848 to a German businessman, Günther would go on to attend several German universities including Erlangen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Berlin, and Göttingen.^[1]

Career

In 1872 he began teaching at a school in Weissenburg, Bavaria. He completed his habilitation thesis on continued fractions entitled Darstellung der Näherungswerte der Kettenbrüche in independenter Form in 1873. The next year he began teaching at Munich Polytechnicum. In 1876, he began teaching at a university in Ansbach where he stayed for several years before moving to Munich and becoming a professor of geography until he retired; he served as the university's rector from 1911 to 1913.^[1]

For some years, Günther was a member of the federal parliament, the Reichstag, and later the Bavarian parliament, representing liberal parties.^[2]

His mathematical work^[1] included works on the determinant, hyperbolic functions, and parabolic logarithms and trigonometry.^[3]

Publications (selection)

• Darstellung der Näherungswerthe der Kettenbrüche in independenter Form. Eduard Besold, Erlangen, 1873
• Vermischte Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Teubner, Leipzig, 1876
• Lehrbuch der Determinanten-Theorie für Studirende. Eduard Besold, Erlangen, 1877
• Die Lehre von den gewöhnlichen und verallgemeinerten Hyperbelfunktionen. Louis Nebert, Halle, 1881
• Parabolische Logarithmen und parabolische Trigonometrie. Teubner, Leipzig, 1882

Further reading

• Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998.
• Josef Reindl: Siegmund Günther. Nürnberg 1908 (online copy at the Univ. Heidelberg, German)
• Joseph Hohmann (1966). "Günther, Adam Wilhelm Siegmund". Neue Deutsche Biographie (in German). Vol. 7. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. pp. 266–267. (full text online).