Braunsweig

Braunsweig¹, Deutschland,² is located by the Harz Mountains at the end of the navigable portion of the Oker River, a tributary of the Aller, in turn a tributary of the Weser. The city of less than a quarter million residents³ is famed for its "Happy Rizzi House", a colorful office building designed by James Rizzi. The 16th century St. Andreas church is the tallest building at 93 meters.⁴

The mathematician, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was born in Braunsweig and while there wrote his work on number theory, Disquisitiones arithmetiticae, and successfully predicted the position of the asteroid, Ceres.

Richard Didekind was also born here and took the ideas of other mathematicians further, expanding and clarifying Dirichlet's number theory work, developing his own theory of real numbers as "Didekind cuts" and treating infinite sets as mathematical objects.⁵

External references

the colorful office building in Braunsweig by the architect, James Rizzi

Footnotes

1. Brunswick in English.
2. Germany in English.
3. 2010 calculation in world-gazetteer.com, accessed 2/16/2011.
4. Emporis.com, accessed 2/17/2011.
5. John Stillwell, Mathematics and its History, 2nd Ed. (Springer, 2002).