Friedrich Robert Helmert

Friedrich Robert Helmert
Professor Friedrich Robert Helmert. Photographer unknown.
Born	( 1843-07-31)31 July 1843 Freiberg, Kingdom of Saxony
Died	15 June 1917(1917-06-15) (aged 73) Potsdam, Germany
Nationality	German
Alma mater	Polytechnische Schule, now Technische Universität, in Dresden, University of Leipzig
Known for	contribution into geodesy and theory of errors.
Awards	recipient of some 25 German and foreign decorations
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics, geodesy
Institutions	Technical University in Aachen, University of Berlin.

Friedrich Robert Helmert (31 July 1843 – 15 June 1917) was a German geodesist and statistician with important contributions to the theory of errors.

Career

Helmert was born in Freiberg, Kingdom of Saxony. After schooling in Freiberg and Dresden, he entered the Polytechnische Schule, now Technische Universität, in Dresden to study engineering science in 1859. Finding him especially enthusiastic about geodesy, one of his teachers, Christian August Nagel, hired him while still a student to work on the triangulation of the Ore Mountains and the drafting of the trigonometric network for Saxony. In 1863 Helmert became Nagel's assistant on the Central European Arc Measurement. After a year's study of mathematics and astronomy Helmert obtained his doctor's degree from the University of Leipzig in 1867 for a thesis based on his work for Nagel.

In 1870 Helmert became instructor and in 1872 professor at RWTH Aachen, the new Technical University in Aachen. At Aachen he wrote Die mathematischen und physikalischen Theorieen der höheren Geodäsie (Part I was published in 1880 and Part II in 1884). This work laid the foundations of modern geodesy. See history of geodesy. Part I is devoted to the mathematical aspects of geodesy and contains a comprehensive summary of techniques for solving for geodesics on an ellipsoid.

The method of least squares had been introduced into geodesy by Gauss and Helmert wrote a fine book on least squares (1872, with a second edition in 1907) in this tradition, which became a standard text. In 1876 he discovered the chi-squared distribution as the distribution of the sample variance for a normal distribution. This discovery and other of his work was described in German textbooks, including his own, but was unknown in English, and hence later rediscovered by English statisticians – the chi-squared distribution by Karl Pearson (1900), and the application to the sample variance by 'Student' and Fisher.

From 1887 Helmert was professor of advanced geodesy at the University of Berlin and director of the Geodetic Institute. In 1916 he had a stroke and died of its effects the following year in Potsdam.

Commemorative headstone in honor of Friedrich Robert Helmert (Telegraph Hill in Potsdam)

Honours

Helmert received many honours. He was president of the global geodetic association of "Internationale Erdmessung", member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1905, and recipient of some 25 German and foreign decorations.

The lunar crater Helmert was named in his honor, approved by the IAU in 1973.

See also

• Coordinate system
• Gauss–Helmert model
• Geodesics on an ellipsoid
• Helmert's equation
• Helmert transformation (in geodesy)
• Helmert–Wolf blocking
• National survey
• Terrestrial gravity field

References

Works cited

• Hald, Anders (1998). A history of mathematical statistics from 1750 to 1930. New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-17912-2.

General references

• Walther Fischer "Helmert, Friedrich Robert" Dictionary of Scientific Biography volume 7, pp. 239–241, New York: Scribners 1973.
• O. B. Sheynin (1995). "Helmert's work in the theory of errors". Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 49, 73–104.
• Die Genauigkeit der Formel von Peters zur Berechnung des wahrscheinlichen Fehlers director Beobachtungen gleicher Genauigkeit, Astron. Nach., 88, (1876), 192–218 An extract from the paper is translated and annotated in H. A. David & A. W. F. Edwards (eds.) Annotated Readings in the History of Statistics, New York: Springer 2001.
• Ihde, Johannes; Reinhold, Andreas (2017-08-08). "Friedrich Robert Helmert, founder of modern geodesy, on the occasion of the centenary of his death". History of Geo- and Space Sciences. 8 (2). Copernicus GmbH: 79–95. Bibcode:2017HGSS....8...79I. doi:10.5194/hgss-8-79-2017. ISSN 2190-5029.
• Witte, Bertold (2017-10-25). "Friedrich Robert Helmert in memory of his 100th year of death". GEM - International Journal on Geomathematics. 8 (2). Springer Science and Business Media LLC: 153–168. Bibcode:2017IJGm....8..153W. doi:10.1007/s13137-017-0098-3. ISSN 1869-2672. S2CID 126314185.

External links

• Royal Society citation 1908 (very succinct)

There is an obituary at

• MNRAS 78 (1918) 256

There is a photograph of Helmert at

• Helmert on the Portraits of Statisticians page

and three more at

• Helmert

See also

• memorial stone

The first edition of Helmert's textbook on least squares is available at the GDZ site

• Die Ausgleichsrechnung nach der Methode der kleinsten Quadrate (Adjustment Computations by the Method of Least Squares)

A partial scan of Die mathematischen und physikalischen Theorieen der höheren Geodäsie (Part I) is available on the site

• Friedrich Robert Helmert (1841–1917)

English translations (by the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, St. Louis) of Parts I and II of Die mathematischen und physikalischen Theorieen der höheren Geodäsie are available at

• doi:10.5281/zenodo.32050
• doi:10.5281/zenodo.32051

There is an account of Helmert's work on the theory of errors in section 10.6 of

• Oscar Sheynin Theory of Probability: A Historical Essay

For eponymous terms in statistics see

• Earliest known uses of some of the words of mathematics: A for the Abbe–Helmert criterion and Earliest known uses of some of the words of mathematics: H for the Helmert transformation.