Jakob Hermann

Jakob Hermann (1678 to 1733) was a mathematician from Basel who worked on problems in classical mechanics and wrote Phoronomia, an early Latin treatise on mechanics published in 1716. He trained under Jacob Bernoulli at the University of Basel, graduated in 1695 and in 1696 obtained a master's degree with a dissertation on infinite series; Bernoulli thought him the best of his many students there, and when Bernoulli died in 1705 Gottfried Leibniz asked Hermann to write his obituary for the Acta Eruditorum. He became a member of the Berlin Academy in 1701, held a chair of mathematics at Padua from 1707, moved to Frankfurt an der Oder in 1713 and to Saint Petersburg in 1724, where he worked closely with Daniel Bernoulli, who succeeded him in his post when Hermann returned to Basel in 1731. In 1729 he proclaimed that graphing a locus in polar coordinates was as easy as in Cartesian coordinates, he appears to have been the first to show that the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector is a constant of motion under an inverse-square central force, and in 1733 he was elected to the Paris Academie Royale des Sciences.