Georg Scheffers

Who was Georg Scheffers?

Georg Scheffers was a German mathematician specializing in differential geometry. He was born on November 21, 1866 in the village of Altendorf near Holzminden. Scheffers began his university career at the University of Leipzig where he studied with Felix Klein and Sophus Lie. Scheffers was a coauthor with Lie for three of the earliest expressions of Lie theory:

Lectures on Differential equations with known Infinitesimal transformations,

Lectures on Continuous groups, and

Geometry of Contact Transformations.

All three are now available online through archive.org; see External links section below.

In 1896 Scheffers became docent at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where he was raised to professor in 1900. From 1907 to 1935, when he retired, Scheffers was a professor at the Technical University of Berlin.

In 1901 he published a German translation of the French textbook on analysis by Joseph Serret. The title was Anwendung der Differential- und Integralrechnung auf die Geometrie. This textbook consisted of two volumes, one on curves and the second on surfaces. A second edition was published in 1910, and a third edition in 1922.