Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804 - 1851) Jewish-German mathematician best known for the Jacobian matrix and the Jacobi symbol.

The second son of a successful banker, young Carl was home-schooled until the age of 12, when he entered the Potsdam high school. Four years after earning a degree from Berlin University in 1825 and converting to Catholicism, Jacobi became a mathematics professor there and taught for a dozen years. He read Greek and Latin fluently, and was quite familiar with the work of Leonhard Euler. In the late 1820s, Jacobi did significant work on elliptic functions in relation to fractions, attracting the interest and praise of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Adrien-Marie Legendre. In 1843, Jacobi went on a vacation to Italy, beginning his retirement.

A lunar crater is named after Jacobi.