Gerhard Kowalewski (27 March 1876 – 21 February 1950) was a German mathematician who introduced the matrices notation.
Waldemar Hermann Gerhard Kowalewski was born on March 27, 1876, in Alt Järshagen in Pomerania, then part of the German Empire.
In 1893 he left home to attend the University of Königsberg where his brother Christian Kowalewski was a professor of philosophy and mathematics.
[1] He researched theories of determinants, transformation groups, natural and differential geometry, and approximation and interpolation, publishing over 100 works, including Vorlesungen über natürliche Geometrie, the German translation of Ernesto Cesàro's work, Das Integral und seine geometrischen Anwendungen in 1910, Über Bolzanos Nichtdifferenzierbare Stetige Funktion, Der Keplersche Korper und andere Bauspiele in 1938, and his memoir in 1950, Bestand und Wandel, as well as 24 mathematical textbooks.
[1] Kowalewski was a member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences, the Société Mathématique de France, and socially associated with members of the Louvre Circle and Prague intellectual elite, which included Berta Fanta, Oskar Kraus, Franz Kafka, Hugo Bergmann, Philipp Frank, Albert Einstein, and Christian von Ehrenfels.