Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (German:[ˈbɛsəl]; 22 July 1784 – 17 March 1846) was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax. A special type of mathematical functions were named Bessel functions after Bessel's death, though they had originally been discovered by Daniel Bernoulli.