David Rytz


David Rytz von Brugg was a Swiss mathematician and teacher.

Life

Rytz von Brugg was son of a priest and studied mathematics at Göttingen and Leipzig. He had teaching positions at various cities, one of them 1835 until 1862 at Aarau, where he was „Professor der Mathematik an der Gewerbeschule zu Aarau“.

Merits

Rytz von Brugg is famous for a geometrical method which is known as Rytz’s axis construction. This classical procedure retrieves the semi-axes of an Ellipse from any pair of conjugate diameters. This method is known since 1845, when it was published within a paper by Leopold Moosbrugger.