Jordan was born in
Ellwangen, a small town in southern Germany. He studied at the polytechnic institute in
Stuttgart and after working for two years as an engineering assistant on the preliminary stages of railway construction he returned there as an assistant in geodesy. In 1868, when he was 26 years old, he was appointed a full professor at Karlsruhe. In 1874 Jordan took part in the expedition of
Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs to Libya. From 1881 until his death he was professor of geodesy and practical geometry at the
Technical University of Hannover. He was a prolific writer and his best known work was his
Handbuch der Vermessungskunde (
Handbook of Geodesy). He is remembered among
mathematicians for the
Gauss–Jordan elimination algorithm, with Jordan improving the
stability of the algorithm so it could be applied to minimizing the squared error in the sum of a series of
surveying observations. This
algebraic technique appeared in the third edition (1888) of his
Textbook of Geodesy. Wilhelm Jordan is not to be confused with the French mathematician
Camille Jordan (
Jordan curve theorem), nor with the German physicist
Pascual Jordan (
Jordan algebras). == Gauss–Jordan elimination ==