Christian Kramp

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Christian Kramp (8 July 1760 – 13 May 1826) was a French mathematician, who worked primarily with factorials.

Christian Kramp's father was his teacher at grammar school in Strasbourg.^[1] Kramp studied medicine and graduated; however, his interests certainly ranged outside medicine, for in addition to a number of medical publications he published a work on crystallography in 1793. In 1795, France annexed the Rhineland area in which Kramp was carrying out his work and after this he became a teacher at Cologne (this city was French from 1794 to 1815), teaching mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Kramp could read and write in German and French.^[1]

Kramp was appointed professor of mathematics at

I use the very simple notation n! to designate the product of numbers decreasing from n to unity, i.e. n(n − 1)(n − 2) ... 3 . 2 . 1. The constant use in combinatorial analysis, in most of my proofs, that I make of this idea, has made this notation necessary. ... I have given it the name 'faculty'. Arbogast has substituted the name 'factorial' which is clearer and more French. In adopting his idea I congratulate myself on paying homage to the memory of my friend.^[1][2]

— Christian Kramp, preface to Elements d'arithmétique universelle, pp. V-VI and XI-XII, 1808

Kramp's function, a scaled complex error function, is today better known as the Faddeeva function.

Works

• Analyse des réfractions astronomiques et terrestres (in French). Strasbourg: Philipp Jakob Dannbach. 1799.
  Bibcode:1799adra.book.....K
  .

External links

• Weisstein, Eric W. "Kramp's Symbol". MathWorld.

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