Friedrich robert helmert biography template

Friedrich Robert Helmert died in Potsdam in at the age of 74 after serving for over 30 years as director of the Royal Prussian Geodetic.

From the founding of the university in until the end of , F. He was only 27 years old when he was appointed a full teacher on January 13, , and on October 10 he began teaching the following disciplines: practical geometry with situation drawings and exercises, adjustment calculation, higher geodesy. Friedrich Robert Helmert held his teaching position in Aachen until December 21, , before taking over the directorship of the Royal Prussian Geodetic Institute in Berlin on January 1, , succeeding General von Baeyer.

This office was also linked to a newly established full professorship for higher geodesy at the Faculty of Philosophy at Berlin University. It is not possible at this point to attempt to portray the brilliant scientist and researcher F. Helmert in terms of his development, significance and scientific impact in the present day.

Comprehensive essays on this subject can be found in various journals and publications, for example by Professors F. Wolf in publication no.

Friedrich Robert Helmert (31 July – 15 June ) was a German geodesist and statistician with important contributions to the theory of errors.

Here, however, the works of the Aachen creative period will be briefly mentioned. Helmert's dissertation on the subject of studies on rational surveying in the field of higher geodesy already showed his delight in mathematical developments, as well as a true-to-life synthesis of theory and experiment, as the work documents the attempt, still valid today, to carry out a survey with the necessary degree of accuracy and with as little time and money as possible.

Although this standard work on adjustment calculation, which is still widely cited today, places great emphasis on practical applications, the mathematical principles are treated in such detail that this book also became valuable to a wide circle of physicists and engineers. The fact that Helmert was no stranger to probability theory and statistics is shown by the fact that he had already applied and published the chi-square distribution, which is widely used in statistics today, in , well before Pearson , to whom it is generally attributed today.

The 70s decade of the extremely productive scientist Helmert finally led to a fundamental work encompassing the whole of geodesy, which was published in two volumes under the title The Mathematical and Physical Theories of Higher Geodesy, the first volume The Mathematical Theories in , the second volume The Physical Theories in With this standard work of land and earth surveying, he provided the theoretical foundations of higher geodesy, interspersed with numerous developments of his own.

In particular, the first volume already contains the theory of perpendicular deviations, which he himself would later put into practice in such a magnificent way. The physical theories, on the other hand, can be seen as the culmination of his geodetic work in Aachen. Here a classical theory of the gravitational field and the figure of the earth is developed, which is also underpinned by extensive examples from practical applications.