David Rytz

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

David Rytz von Brugg (April 1, 1801 – March 25, 1868) was a Swiss mathematician and teacher. He was the son of a priest and studied mathematics at Göttingen and Leipzig. He taught in several cities, including Aarau from 1835 to 1862, where he was Professor of Mathematics at the Gewerbeschule zu Aarau. He is best known for Rytz’s axis construction, a geometric method to find the ellipse’s semi-axes from any pair of conjugate diameters. The method became known in 1845, in a paper by Leopold Moosbrugger.