Background
Ferdinand Rudio was born on August 2, 1856, in Wiesbaden, Germany. His parents were Heinrich Rudio, a public official of the Duchy of Nassau, and Luise Klein, the daughter of a well-known forestry official.
ETH Zurich, Rämistrasse 101 CH-8092 Zürich Switzerland, Zurich
In 1874 Ferdinand Rudio began studying at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, then known as the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich and graduated in 1877.
Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
From 1877 until 1880 Rudio studied at the University of Berlin where he attended the seminar of Eduard Kummer and Karl Weierstrass.
Ferdinand Rudio, German and Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics.
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1900
Ferdinand Rudio was born on August 2, 1856, in Wiesbaden, Germany. His parents were Heinrich Rudio, a public official of the Duchy of Nassau, and Luise Klein, the daughter of a well-known forestry official.
Rudio was educated at the local gymnasium and Realgymnasium in Wiesbaden. He entered the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich in 1874 to study civil engineering but, after three semesters in the Engineering Department, he moved to the Mathematics and Physics Department, influenced by the inspirational teaching of Karl Geiser. Rudio also had Kurt Culmann (1821-1881), Wilhelm Fiedler and Hermann Schwarz as lecturers.
From 1877 until 1880 Rudio studied at the University of Berlin where he attended the seminar of Eduard Kummer and Karl Weierstrass. Advised by these two famous mathematicians, he obtained a doctorate from the University of Berlin with a thesis on Kummer's problem of determining all surfaces of which the centres of curvature form second order cofocal surfaces.
In 1881 Rudio returned to Zurich as a lecturer at the Polytechnic; he was appointed professor of mathematics there in 1889 and served in that post until 1928. He also administered the Polytechnic’s library from 1893 to 1919.
Rudio wrote on a number of topics in the history of mathematics, including the quadrature of the circle, Simplicius’ work on quadratures, and Hippocrates’ lunes. He also composed biographies of contemporary mathematicians and wrote a history of the Zurich Naturforschende Gesellschaft for the years 1746 to 1896.
Of particular importance was Rudio’s project for editing the collected works of Euler. He first proposed this edition in 1883, on the occasion of the centenary of Euler’s death, then brought it up again before the meeting of the first International Congress of Mathematicians at Zurich in 1897, and finally suggested has an appropriate memorial for the bicentennial of Eulers birth in 1907.
His efforts bore fruit in 1909, when the Naturforschende Gesellschaft decided to undertake the work, and named Rudio general editor. He himself edited two volumes (the Commentationes arithmeticae) and brought out an additional three in collaboration, including the Introductio in analysin infinitorum. In all, he supervised the production of some thirty volumes.
(Volume 52)
1907(Volume 46)
1901(Volume 48)
1903(Volume 44)
1899(Volume 43)
1898(Volume 53)
1908
Quotations:
"It was not alone the striving for universal culture which attracted the great masters of the Renaissance, such as Brunellesco, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and especially Albrecht Dürer, with irresistible power to the mathematical sciences. They were conscious that, with all the freedom of the individual fantasy, art is subject to necessary laws, and conversely, with all its rigor of logical structure, mathematics follows aesthetic laws."
"We may safely say, that the whole form of modern mathematical thinking was created by Euler. It is only with the greatest difficulty that one is able to follow the writings of any author immediately preceding Euler, because it was not yet known how to let the formulas speak for themselves. This art Euler was the first one to teach."
Ferdinand Rudio was a leading member of the GeP Society (an alma mater organisation of former "Polytechnicians,") and a member of the lectures' association of both the University and the Polytechnic (the representative body of the popular "Town Hall Lectures" in Zürich). He was also a member and served as president of the Zürich Natural Sciences Society.
Ferdinand Rudio married Maria Emma Müller, the daughter of Carl Wilhelm Nepomuk, in 1888. Maria was from Rheinfelden, near Basle on the Swiss-German border; Ferdinand and Maria Rudio had three daughters.