Johann Benedict Listing

Johann Benedict Listing (1808 to 1882) was a German mathematician and physicist, born in Frankfurt and remembered as a pioneer of topology, which takes its name from his work. He studied mathematics and architecture at Göttingen and took his doctorate in 1834 under Carl Friedrich Gauss, then spent three years travelling with Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen to study the volcanic activity of Mount Etna. In 1839 he was appointed professor of physics as the successor to Wilhelm Eduard Weber, and in 1849 he became professor of mathematics at Göttingen. His Vorstudien zur Topologie of 1847 helped bring the term into general use, he discovered the properties of the Möbius strip independently of August Ferdinand Möbius in 1858, and in 1872 he coined the word geoid for the idealized figure of the Earth. In ophthalmology, Listing's law describes the coordination of the eye muscles.