Bessel It Is Hardly Necessary to Mention Bessel’S Great Discoveries
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Bessel It is hardly necessary to mention Bessel’s great discoveries. Here, his biography is described, partly by himself, two of his popular writings are included as also a few pages of the translator which document Bessel’s happy-go-lucky attitude. Two souls had been living in his breast! F. W. Bessel Biography; Two Papers; His Appraisal Translated by Oscar Sheynin Contents Introduction by the translator I. F. W. Bessel, Brief recollections of my life, 1876 II. R. Engelmann, [Supplement to I], 1876 III. F. W. Bessel, Letter to Airy (1833), 1876 IV. F. W. Bessel, On the calculus of probability, 1848 V. F. W. Bessel, On measures and weights in general etc., 1848 VI. Joh. A. Repsold, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, 1920 VII. O. Sheynin, The other Bessel Introduction (O. S.) The works of Gauss are mentioned throughout, and I list them here. Werke , Bde 1 – 12. Göttingen, 1863 – 1930. Reprint: Hildesheim, 1973 – 1981. Werke , Ergänzungsreihe, Bde 1 – 5. Hildesheim, 1973 – 1981. These volumes are reprints of the previously published correspondence of Gauss with Bessel (Bd. 1); Bolyai (Bd. 2); Gerling (Bd. 3); Olbers (Bd. 4, No. 1 – 2); and Schumacher (Bd. 5, No. 1 – 3). Notation : W-i = Werke , Bd. i. W/Erg-i = Werke , Ergänzungsreihe, Bd. i. Bessel’s Abhandlungen , Bde 1 – 3. Leipzig, 1875 – 1876 are his selected works (editor, R. Engelmann). A list of Bessel’s works is in his Abhandlungen , Bd. 3, pp. 490 – 504. These contributions are there numbered; two numbers are provided for those that are included in the Abhandlungen . Notation : [No. i] = Bessel’s contribution i included in the list, but not in the Abhandlungen [No. i/j] = Bessel’s contribution i included both in the list and in the Abhandlungen and accompanied there by number j Many letters exchanged by Bessel. Gauss, Olbers and Schumacher are quoted. Notation : B – S = letter from Bessel to Schumacher; G – O = letter from Gauss to Olbers; etc. Special notation : S, G, i means see downloadable Document i on my website www.sheynin.de or on its copy at Google, Oscar Sheynin, Home. Such documents are my translations from Russian or German or in its original English if barely available. I mention three representatives of the Repsold family, all of them manufacturers of optical instruments; the last-mentioned was also the author of the contribution below. Johann Georg, 1770 – 1830; Adolf, 1806 – 1871; Johann Adolf, 1838 – 1919 I F. W. Bessel Brief Recollections of My Life Kurze Erinnerungen an Momente meines Lebens. Abh ., Bd. 1. Editor, R. Engelmann. Leipzig, 1876, pp. XI – XXIV 1 [1] I was born in Minden on 22 July 1784. My father was a [local] government secretary (Regierungssekretär), manager of various funds (Kassen), legal advisor of the then existing ecclesiastical parish of the Johanniter-Malteser order from which he received the title of counsellor-at-law. In Westphalia he became the first registrar of the tribunal. After happier times had returned, he moved to Paderborn where I saw him for the last time in 1819. My mother was the daughter of a pastor Schrader in Rehme 2. For me, both parents had always remained models of honesty and had been generally recognized as such. My father was not only honest, he was also clever. My mother presented the most perfect picture I have ever seen of self-sacrificing love for others. In my ripe years I have often recalled her attitudes and was unable to remember even a single wish of hers which was not shelved off to the last. Only by extreme thrift was the income sufficient. Surmounting essential hindrances my parents had brought up three sons and six daughters. My father’s serious thought and extremely intensive activity had often been necessary for earning a living and for teaching of so many children. Had he lived longer, he, a subordinate clerk of a judicial board, would have been happy to see his eldest and youngest boys achieving worthy positions as presidents of district courts in Kleve and Saarbrücken respectively whereas his middle son, although not versed in law, was honoured by many distinctions. Three daughters out of the six have married and two of the other three have died so that seven members of the family are still living (on 12 Febr. 1846 3). Our family is noble. One of my ancestors, my great-grandfather as I think, had not used the customary distinctive sign of such families [apparently, the von – O. S.] (I do not remember having heard the reason why), and both my grandfather and father followed suit. The latter and my brothers told me that, nevertheless, we may still claim that sign but none of us seemed to desire it although our cousins have successfully done it. Our family also owns considerable territories held in fee (Lehngüter). Parts of them are near Petershagen, near Minden and, as I think, in Pomerania. Our Lehnsvetter [Vetter – cousin – O. S.] claimed them back even in our century. Later, however, I do not know why, they lost their claim. Presumably these territories had not been recognized as feuds anymore or the cousins had agreed to be recompensed. I do not anymore remember anything remarkable about my youth although I recall being somehow distinguished from other school students of the same age. Many times in the lower classes up to the unter Tertia [to the fourth class], after which I left school, I was kept in after school which was quite proper since I had always detested the rudiments of Latin. To avoid them, I explained to my father that I was strongly disposed towards calculation and therefore wished to become a merchant. In spite of his sense of justness my father would have hardly satisfied the wish of a lazy schoolboy, although having this inclination coupled with a special calculating skill, had I not been supported by one of our teachers, the assistant principal Thilo 4. He was an enthusiast of mathematics and natural science, but, as I had later easily understood, highly ignorant although being endowed with an active speculative mind. Once I had for so long rubbed with sand a round piece of window glass that to a certain extent it began to concentrate sun rays. I showed it to Thilo and asked him how to turn it into a real lens. The glass, although barely effective, inflamed the enthusiast, and I am thankful to him for his support which proved decisive for my later life. Father agreed, took me out of the school and allowed me to study further writing and arithmetic as well as the French language and geography, [2] From that period of my life (13 − 14 years old) I recall an episode which I wish to put on record since it shows the sharpness of my eyesight from which I had been able to expect much without exhausting its power. For making out the constellations I compared the sky with its picture on a plane in an old geographical atlas. After coming to the Lyra I suddenly noticed that one of the two stars that together with Wega form an almost equilateral triangle consisted of two stars. I called my elder brother so that he would also be delighted by this astronomical discovery. However, he did not see those two stars but rather, with effort, one elongated star. His eyesight was apparently already weakened by diligently doing his homework. These stars were ε and 5 Lyra known to be only 1/8 (viertelhalb) of a minute apart. I have often glanced at them to notice how the weakening of my eyesight was going on. Already in Lilienthal I was hardly able to see those stars separately, and later I saw only one elongated star whereas now I see it only with effort. Recently Argelander has zealously and minutely studied the picture of the sky as seen by the naked eye and mapped it in his book (1843) along with a list of stars with their most thoroughly determined magnitudes. His maps show only one star instead of the two mentioned, ε and 5 Lyra, and, accordingly, they are listed as a single star of the fourth magnitude. It is thus stated that the usual eyesight can only see both stars as a single object, and I have good cause to believe that eyes which are able by attentively looking to see these stars separately, are unusually sharp. If, however, this is possible at once, the eyes are sharp to a rare extent. [3] In 1798 a friend of my father obtained a promise from a respected commercial firm Andreas Gottlieb Kulenkamp & Sons in Bremen to take me on as a trainee in exchange for seven years of working for free. My father himself brought me to Bremen. We arrived there on 1 Jan. 1799 and next day I was shown my place in the office (in einem Comptoirpulte). I found myself in a new world which intensely seized me. What I learned in the parental home was extremely restricted, it only concerned the well-being, or rather the difficult preservation of the thought-over meagre things. On the contrary, in Bremen considerable commercial deals, about which I had gradually learned from copies of business letters, went by before my eyes. The grandeur of these deals interested me so strongly that I, even after working hours, remained in the office and studied all the business accounts to achieve an overview of the entire process of trade. Soon I succeeded and on many occasions, when some detail escaped the memory of other employees of the office, had put to good use my procured knowledge.