Biography

Paul Bachmann studied at Berlin, then Göttingen where he attended lectures by Dirichlet and became a close friend of Dedekind who was a fellow student. He received a doctorate in 1862 for a thesis on group theory under Kummer's supervision. He was professor at Breslau and then Münster. His most important work is a complete survey of number theory giving both the results and an evaluation of the methods of proof.

Bachmann also introduced the so called Bachmann diagrams. Up to the 1990's they were popular amongst analysts to further enhance their methodologies in analyzing program development. This method propagated the structural analysis. Here is a simple example.

In this example the question is: when can I buy a car.
Take this diagram to answer this question.

The answer is:

• buy a car when it costs less than 50.000 and you are not a millionaire
• buy the car of over 150.000 when you are a millionaire

You can now see that with this type of diagrams you could make a good structural analysis of a problem.

But when software became more and more complicated this idea was left in favor of the program structure diagrams. That type could handle more intricate schematics.