Alexander Wilkens

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Alexander Friedrich Karl Wilkens (born May 23, 1881 in Hamburg ; † January 27, 1968 ) was a German astronomer.

Wilkens visited the Johanneum in Hamburg and then studied mathematics, physics and astronomy in Heidelberg , Kiel (with Paul Harzer , Paul Stäckel , Philipp Lenard ) and Göttingen (among others with Felix Klein , Hermann Minkowski , Karl Schwarzschild ) from 1900 to 1905 . In 1904 he received his doctorate in Göttingen, where he was also an assistant in the Gauss archive. He then worked as an assistant at the observatories in Vienna ( Kuffner observatory ), Heidelberg (first assistant 1905/06), Hamburg and from 1908 to 1916 observers at the Kiel observatory near Harzer.

Wilkens was director of the observatory and professor in Breslau from 1916 to 1925 . In 1925 he succeeded Hugo von Seeliger as director of the Munich University Observatory .

In 1934 he was forced to resign by the National Socialists. At the suggestion of Félix Aguilar, he emigrated with his family to Argentina, where he worked from 1937 to 1953 at the university and at the Observatorio Astronómico of La Plata . He then moved back to Munich as Professor Emeritus at the university. His son Herbert Wilkens (1910–1977), who worked at the observatory in Wroclaw until 1937, also came to the observatory in La Plata and worked there as an astronomer until 1976.

Wilkens was particularly concerned with celestial mechanics , in particular perturbation theory and orbit determination. As an astronomical observer, he discovered a discrepancy between the astronomical declination systems used in the northern and southern hemispheres.

In 1926 he became a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

He was buried in 1968 in the Bogenhausen cemetery in Munich, where other famous astronomers had already found their final resting place.

In 1980 the asteroid (1688) Wilkens was named after him.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1969AN....291...87S/0000087.000.html
  2. ↑ Alexander Wilken's obituary by Ludwig Biermann in the 1969 yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (PDF file).
  3. ↑ https://www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/cms-media/media-22865320.pdf

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Wilkens, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilkens, Alexander Friedrich Karl (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 1968