Carl Runge

Carl Runge (1856 to 1927) was a German mathematician and physicist, born in Bremen and raised partly in Havana, who held a chair at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover from 1886 and died in Gottingen. Early in his career he devised a procedure for the numerical solution of algebraic equations in which the roots are expressed as infinite series of rational functions of the coefficients, and his method contained the classical methods of Newton, Bernoulli and Graffe as special cases. He then turned to the measurement of spectral line wavelengths of the elements, working with Heinrich Kayser and later Friedrich Paschen. His numerical procedure for solving equations is the reason the atlas places him among the early contributors to numerical methods.