Helmert's work in the theory of errors (Q1897791)

The geodesist Friedrich Robert Helmert (1843-1919) was professor at Aachen till 1866, then at Berlin and Potsdam. He was the main follower of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) in geodesy. His topics were theory of errors, method of least squares, normal distribution, adjustment of triangulation, study of density by graphical methods, partition of variance (but not analysis of variance), revelation of systematic errors by the Abbe criterion, precision of mean square error, the Helmert transformation, precision of paired observations , and applications to geodetic observations. His celebrated treatise Ausgleichsrechnung appeared in 1872, a second edition in 1907 and a third one posthumously in 1924. It largely determined the state of this topic up to 1920's- 1930's. Helmert also contributed to the chi-square-distribution, which is being traced back to Ernst Abbe (1863), James Clerk Maxwell (1860), Irénée Jules Bienaymé (1852), and Pierre Simon Laplace. Hints are given to the link of German and Russian geodesists which dates back to Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve (b. 1793 in Altona, d. 1864 in St. Petersburg). In 1914 the second edition of Helmert's Ausgleichsrechnung was partly translated into Russian and in 1962 appeared a Russian translation of Helmert's Die mathematische und physikalische Theorie der höheren Geodäsie. 1942 Feodosy Nikolaewich Krasovsky developed the specifications for primary triangulation and their adjustments. He devoted much attention to the Helmert method of adjusting. From Helmert's 100 constributions (books and articles) 20 are referred to as are 86 references of other authors.