Completing the series of blog posts on the histories of mathematicians whose theorems we have learned, here are some interesting historical tidbits on Carl David Tolmé Runge and Martin Wilhelm Kutta of the (famously painful to derive as we are all aware of after our homework problem) Runge-Kutta Method.

 Carl Runge: 

Though originally enrolled at the University of Munich to study literature, he soon found his true calling and changed his field of study to Physics and Mathematics accordingly after only 6 weeks. Another prominent name in Physics, Max Planck, often attended the same lectures as Runge did at Munich. After several lectures in Berlin delivered by Karl Weierstrass, he decided to focus more on pure mathematics, and indeed he went on to study under Weierstrass after he recieved his doctorate. He then became a professor at the University of Hanover, where he worked on developing the field of what we now call as numerical analysis. He also developed interests in spectroscopy and astrophysics, and managed to arranged the spectral lines of helium into 2 spectral series.

In 1895, he published the first steps on what would later be known as the Runge-Kutta method.

Unfortunately, the field of numerical analysis did not become well received by the academic community while he was alive - although he became the Chair of Mathematics at Gottingen in 1904, he was the inventor and sole practicioner of his work. He eventually retired in 1925.

Another mathematical result he is known for is the Runge phenomenon, where polynomial interpolation with high degree polynomials can cause instances where using equidistant points causes the interpolation error to go to infinity.

Also interesting is the fact that he has a crater on the moon named after him.

 References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_David_Tolmé_Runge

http://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu/anecdotes/runge.html

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 Martin Kutta:

Kutta’s parents died when he was still young, and he and his brother were brought up by his uncle in Breslau. He went on to study in the University of Breslau and the University of Munich, with mathematics always being his chief interest, although he also showed interest in the fields of language, music and art. His thesis, which was published in 1900, extended Runge’s earlier published method.

His colleague at the University of Munich, Sebastian Finsterwalde, kindled his interest in aerodynamics, and he went on to discover important formulas relating to the lift on an aerofoil in terms of the circulation round it, called the Zhukovsky- Kutta theorem (named as such even though published it 4 years before Zhukovsky). Sebastian Finsterwalde also inspired interest in glaciers to Kutta, and Kutta went on to work on maps of the East Alps covered by glaciers.

In 1911, after stints in the University of Munich, the University of Jena, and the Technische Hochschule at Aachen, he became an ordinary professor at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart in 1911 and remained there until he retired in 1935.

References:

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kutta.html