Skilled in applied mathematics, Kummer trained German army officers in ballistics; afterwards, he taught for 10 years in a gymnasium, the German equivalent of high school, where he inspired the mathematical career of Leopold Kronecker.
10 Facts About Ernst Kummer
2.
Ernst Kummer was awarded a PhD from the University of Halle in 1831 for writing a prize-winning mathematical essay, which was eventually published a year later.
3.
In 1840, Ernst Kummer married Ottilie Mendelssohn, daughter of Nathan Mendelssohn and Henriette Itzig.
4.
Ernst Kummer's second wife, Bertha Cauer, was a maternal cousin of Ottilie.
5.
Ernst Kummer retired from teaching and from mathematics in 1890 and died three years later in Berlin.
6.
Ernst Kummer made several contributions to mathematics in different areas; he codified some of the relations between different hypergeometric series, known as contiguity relations.
7.
Ernst Kummer proved Fermat's Last Theorem for a considerable class of prime exponents.
8.
Ernst Kummer's methods were closer, perhaps, to p-adic ones than to ideal theory as understood later, though the term 'ideal' was invented by Kummer.
9.
Ernst Kummer studied what were later called Kummer extensions of fields: that is, extensions generated by adjoining an nth root to a field already containing a primitive nth root of unity.
10.
Ernst Kummer further conducted research in ballistics and, jointly with William Rowan Hamilton he investigated ray systems.