Background
Adolph Goepel was born on September 29, 1812, in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. He was the son of a music teacher.
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Goepel entered the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1829 and received his doctorate in 1835.
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Goepel entered the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1829 and received his doctorate in 1835.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Entwurf-Theorie-Abelschen-Transcendenten-Ordnung/dp/0265450039/?tag=prabook0b-20
1847
Adolph Goepel was born on September 29, 1812, in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. He was the son of a music teacher.
Goepel was able, thanks to an uncle, the British consul in Corsica, to spend several years of his childhood in Italy, where in 1825-1826 he attended lectures on mathematics and physics in Pisa. He entered the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1829 and received his doctorate in 1835.
After earning his doctorate, Goepel taught at the Werder Gymnasium and at the Royal Realschule before becoming an official at the royal library in Berlin. Since he had little contact with his mathematical colleagues, all we know about him is what C. G. J. Jacobi and A. L. Crelle wrote in the brief accounts they contributed to Crelle’s Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik shortly after his death. Of the two, only Crelle knew him personally, and for but a short time.
In his doctoral dissertation Goepel sought to derive from the periodic continued fractions of the roots of whole numbers the representation of those numbers by certain quadratic forms. Following an eight-year pause after his dissertation, he wrote several works for Grunert’s Archiv der Mathematik und Physik, for which he was then working. In them he showed thorough familiarity with Jacob Steiner’s style of synthetic geometry.
Goepel owes his fame to “Theoriae transcendentium Abelianarum primi ordinis adumbratio levis,” published after his death in Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik. The investigations contained in this paper can be viewed as a continuation of the ideas of C. G. J. Jacobi.
