Christian Kramp

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. 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. In fact, the more general concept of factorial was found at the same time by Arbogast.

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

Works