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Concept
Friedrich Bessel
Summary
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (ˈbɛsl̩; 22 July 1784 – 17 March 1846) was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax. Certain important mathematical functions were named Bessel functions after Bessel's death, though they had originally been discovered by Daniel Bernoulli before being generalised by Bessel.
Bessel was born in Minden, Westphalia, then capital of the Prussian administrative region Minden-Ravensberg, as second son of a civil servant into a large family. At the age of 14 he left the school, because he did not like the education in latin language, and apprenticed in the import-export concern Kulenkamp at Bremen. The business's reliance on cargo ships led him to turn his mathematical skills to problems in navigation. This in turn led to an interest in astronomy as a way of determining longitude.
Bessel came to the attention of Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, a practising physician of Bremen and well-known astronomer, by producing a refinement on the orbital calculations for Halley's Comet in 1804, using old observation data taken from Thomas Harriot and Nathaniel Torporley in 1607. Franz Xaver von Zach edited the results in his journal Monatliche Correspondenz.
Having finished his commercial education, Bessel left Kulenkamp in 1806 and became assistant at Johann Hieronymus Schröter's private observatory in Lilienthal near Bremen as successor of Karl Ludwig Harding. There he worked on James Bradley's stellar observation data to produce precise positions for some 3,222 stars.
Despite lacking any higher education, especially at university, Bessel was appointed director of the newly founded Königsberg Observatory by King Frederick William III of Prussia in January 1810, at the age of 25, and remained in that position until his death. By reason of lacking any academical degree some colleagues of the Philosophical Faculty disputed Bessel's right to teach mathematics.
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