Eduard Selling, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetEduard Selling
German mathematician
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Ansbach, Bavaria, Germany
About Eduard Selling
- Eduard Selling (5 November 1834 in Ansbach – 31 January 1920 in Munich) was a German mathematician and inventor of calculating machines. Selling studied mathematics at the Universities of Göttingen and Munich (under Philipp Ludwig von Seidel).
- He obtained the doctorate in Munich in 1859, under the supervision of Bernhard Riemann.
- On recommendation of Leopold Kronecker he became professor extraordinarius of mathematics at the University of Würzburg in 1860 – against the will of the philosophical faculty and the mathematics professor Aloys Mayr.
- There, he also taught astronomy and became conservator-restorer at the astronomical department in 1879.
- In 1873 he wrote an important paper on binary and ternary quadratic forms which was also translated into French and cited by Henri Poincaré, Émile Picard and Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann.
- Beginning with 1877 he also became concerned with insurance, and participated in the reorganization of the pensions in Bavaria on behalf of the Bavarian government.
- His application for a promotion to professor ordinarius was declined in 1891.
- In 1906 he became emeritus. For his own extensive computations (for instance, signed-digit representation), he initially used computational machines by Thomas de Colmar with which he was not satisfied.
- Therefore, he built multiplication machines after the model of a Pantograph, for which he got a patent in 1886, and a prize at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
- However, the machine was complicated to use and to produce, so it didn't gain much importance.
- Some 30 to 40 devices were produced until 1898.
- He also built a few copies of an improved version and designed a third electrical machine (patent in 1894).
- The later inventor of computational machines, Christel Hamann, participated in those constructions.
- Some copies of Selling's machine can be seen, for instance, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Read more at Wikipedia
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