German, Iakov

Born July 16, 1678, in Basel; died there July 14, 1733. The first academician-mathematician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1725). A Swiss by birth, he was a pupil of Jakob Bernoulli. German introduced wide applications of polar coordinates, worked out spatial analytic geometry, studied curves on a spherical surface, and was the first in Russia to study the history of mathematics.