Carl Runge

Carl David Tolme Runge was a German mathematician, physicist and spectroscopist, born in 1856, who spent his first years in Havana, where his father was the Danish consul, before the family moved to Bremen. He took his doctorate in mathematics at Berlin in 1880 under Karl Weierstrass and became a professor at the Technische Hochschule Hannover in 1886. He worked on spectral lines of the elements with Heinrich Kayser and was keenly interested in astronomical spectroscopy, geodesy and astrophysics. He is a co-developer and co-eponym of the Runge-Kutta method of numerical analysis. In 1904, on the initiative of Felix Klein, he accepted a position at the University of Gottingen, where he stayed until retiring in 1925.