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Ludwig Schläfli first studied theology, then turned to science. He worked for ten years as a school teacher in Thun. During this period he studied advanced mathematics in his spare time.
Schläfli was an expert linguist speaking many languages including Sanskritt and Rigveda. In 1843 Steiner, Jacobi and Dirichlet travelled to Rome and took Schläfli as an interpreter. He gained greatly from discussions with these mathematicians.
Schläfli's work was in geometry, arithmetic and function theory. He gave the integral representation of the Bessel function and of the gamma function. He also worked on elliptic modular functions.
Schläfli made an important contribution to non- Euclidean (elliptic) geometry when he proposed that spherical three-dimensional space could be regarded as the surface of a hypersphere in Euclidean four-dimensional space.
In 1853 Schläfli became professor of mathematics at Bern. His major work Theory of continuous manifolds was published in 1901 after his death and only then did his importance become fully appreciated.
He received the Steiner Prize from the Berlin Academy for his discovery of the 27 lines and the 36 double six on the general cubic surface.
Schläfli also made significant contributions to celestial mechanics.
Texto original por: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
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| List of References (4 books/articles)
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| A Poster of Ludwig Schläfli | Mathematicians born in the same country |
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| JOC/EFR December 1996 | School of
Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland | 
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