Wilhelm Jordan

Who was Wilhelm Jordan?

Wilhelm Jordan was a German geodesist who did surveys in Germany and Africa and founded the German geodesy journal.

Jordan was born in Ellwangen, a small town in southern Germany. He studied at the polytechnic institute in Stuttgart and after working for two years as an engineering assistant on the preliminary stages of railway construction he returned there as an assistant in geodesy. In 1868, when he was 26 years old, he was appointed a full professor at Karlsruhe. In 1874 Jordan took part in the expedition of Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs to Libya. From 1881 until his death he was professor of geodesy and practical geometry at the Technical University Hanover. He was a prolific writer and his best known work was his Handbuch der Vermessungskunde

He is remembered among mathematicians for the Gauss–Jordan elimination algorithm, with Jordan improving the stability of the algorithm so it could be applied to minimizing the squared error in the sum of a series of surveying observations. This algebraic technique appeared in the third edition of his Textbook of Geodesy.

Wilhelm Jordan is not to be confused with the mathematician Camille Jordan, nor with the German physicist Pascual Jordan.