Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes

Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes (July 27, 1777 – May 17, 1834) was a German physicist, meteorologist, and astronomer.

Brandes was born in 1777 in Groden (a former exclave of Hamburg, today Cuxhaven), the third son of Albert Georg Brandes, a preacher. He studied at the University of Göttingen from 1796 to 1798 under Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Carl Friedrich Gauss was a fellow student, He attained his doctorate in 1800, and spent a short time teaching privately.

From 1801 to 1811 he was at first a technical designer of dykes on the Weser river at Eckwarden, Butjadingen, in the Duchy of Oldenburg, and later a dyke inspector for the lower right bank of the Weser.

In 1811 he became a professor of mathematics at the newly created University of Breslau, a merger of two Wrocław colleges. In 1826 he gained the chair of physics at the University of Leipzig.

He had a very wide range of activities. He wrote a considerable number of mathematics textbooks. In 1820 he published the first weather charts in "Beiträgen zur Witterungskunde" ("Contributions to Meteorology"). Thus he is considered to be a founder of synoptic meteorology. In 1824 he developed a new method to compute the Euler constant numerically. He died on May 17, 1834 in Leipzig.

Publications

*"Versuche, die Entfernung, die Geschwindigkeit und die Bahnen der Sternschnuppen zu bestimmen" ("Attempts to determine the distance, speed and course of meteors") (with Johann Friedrich Benzenberg; 1800)
*"Die vornehmsten Lehren der Astronomie in Briefen an eine Freundin dargestellt" ("Major theories of astronomy, described in letters to a friend") (4 vols, 1811-16)
*"Untersuchungen über den mittleren Gang der Wärmeänderungen durchs ganze Jahr; über gleichzeitige Witterungs – Ereignisse in weit voneinander entfernten Weltgegenden; über die Formen der Wolken, die Entstehung des Regens und der Stürme; und über andere Gegenstände der Witterungskunde" ("Meteorology") (Leipzig: Barth, 1820)