Bill Cormann Giessen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bill Cormann Giessen (born June 8, 1932 in Pittsburgh , † March 25, 2010 in Boston ) was an American physicist, entrepreneur and university professor in Boston.

Life

Giessen's father Ernst Giessen came from a Prussian civil servant family from the Rhineland. He was supposed to become an officer and came to the main cadet institute . Ernst Giessen's older brother died as a 17-year-old flag boy on the western front in the last days of the First World War. Since the cadet schools were dissolved after the Peace Treaty of Versailles , Ernst Giessen passed a civil Abitur in Cologne. He studied mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen . As a graduate engineer, he found his first job in Poznan at the end of the 1920s . There he met the lawyer Gustel Cormann, a daughter of the Stettin OLG President Paul Cormann . The two soon married. Ernst Giessen saw no professional future in the economic and political hardship of the Weimar Republic . With his wife he emigrated to Pittsburgh; but the Great Depression also reached the center of American steel and heavy industry. Ernst Giessen's difficult situation only improved when he and an American partner took over the sole agency for the Mannesmannröhren-Werke ; because the tubes had no weld seam and were far superior to all competing products. Nevertheless, Gustel Cormann Giessen - intelligent, delicate and very musically inclined - was very unhappy in America. She suffered from difficult economic conditions. When she gave birth to Bill in June 1932, her sister came from Germany. Gertrud, older and energetic, took over the household; but the love triangle didn't work. After 18 months it was decided to return to Germany. The two women traveled home to the “New Reich” with little Bill . Ernst Giessen, forced out of business by his partner, stayed in Pittsburgh for another year. His father-in-law Paul Cormann had been forced into retirement by the National Socialists and settled in Wiesbaden.

Childhood and youth

Bill Giessen had a happy early childhood in the upper class home of his grandfather Paul Cormann . The father found a good job at Degussa in Cologne and was made an indispensable director during World War II . The operation Millennium enforced in 1942 a renewed move. The grandparents and aunt Gertrud moved to Idar-Oberstein with Bill . Paul Cormann's wife came from a wealthy Jewish family of Oberstein pearl traders who had previously had branches in all European trading metropolises. In order not to attract attention, Bill had to join the German Young People . In Operation Undertone , he was sent home by a former sergeant. After the Wehrmacht surrendered , the family moved to Frankfurt am Main . Throughout his life, Bill Giessen referred to the city as his “real” home. Attracted by chemistry, physics and mathematics at an early age, he enrolled at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen on the recommendation of his grandfather . In 1951 he became active in the Corps Franconia Tübingen . Scale lengths were not easy for him as a left-hander . He didn't enjoy drinking beer. When he was inactive , he moved to the University of Innsbruck , the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main ( preliminary diploma ) and the Georg August University in Göttingen . With a metallurgical doctoral thesis with Peter Haasen , he was awarded a Dr. rer. nat. PhD. His doctoral supervisor placed him as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . At MIT he met his future wife, Mary Carolyn Burns. Bound with her and her daughter Nora in Boston, Giessen had to decline the Göttingen call to the chair of his retired doctoral supervisor.

Boston

Since MIT does not do house appointments, Bill Giessen followed the call of Northeastern University in 1968 . He worked at the Chemical Institute for 40 years. In 1973 he chaired the committee that decided to found the Barnett Institute for Analytical Chemistry . It has become one of the world's leading research institutions in analytical chemistry and biology. With industrial partners in the greater Boston area, biotechnology was established as a further focus. As deputy director of the Barnett Institute, Giessen represented materials science and technology . In 1978 he founded Cambridge Analytical . The company was one of the first private organizations in the USA to examine environmental samples. The company had 110 employees and annual sales of $ 11 million. Giessen led the company until it was sold (1989). In the last 15 years he has devoted himself to chemometrics and the determination of stock market movements on the basis of scientific algorithms . The first member of his research group received his doctorate in 2008. He was repeatedly voted one of the most popular university teachers by students in Boston. He recorded 225 publications and 15 patents . Based in Arlington, Massachusetts , he was due to retire in June 2010 at the age of 78. He died three months earlier in intensive care at a Boston hospital. His daughter Nora's children are Fredrike and Bruno Giron-Giessen.

understanding

Signed by the time of National Socialism and remembering the crimes committed in the German name, Bill Giessen endeavored to reach an understanding between German-Americans and Jews in the United States . He was involved in a Jewish-German Dialogue Group with Holocaust survivors and young Germans. He founded the Gustel Cormann Foundation and financed the annual Salomon Morton Memorial Lecture on the history of the Holocaust . In 1997 he donated the Gideon Klein Prize in honor of his mother Gustel Cormann Giessen .

Honors

The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society awarded him the prize named after William Hume-Rothery in 1990 for his groundbreaking research in materials science and especially in semiconductor technology . Cormann Giessen was inducted into American Men and Women of Science .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Michael Streit: Bill Cormann Giessen . Tübinger Frankenzeitung (2010)
  2. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 39/1101
  3. ↑ Dissertation: The state diagrams of the multi-component systems iron-phosphorus-titanium, iron-phosphorus-silicon, silicon-phosphorus .
  4. ^ Symposium in Boston (1985)
  5. ↑ Michael Streit: 30 years of the Barnett Institute - the life's work of our AH Bill Giessen . Tübinger Frankenzeitung 221, p. 46 ff.
  6. ↑ Dissertation Zhaoyang Zhao
  7. ^ New York Times
  8. ↑ Obituary (The Boston Globe)
  9. ^ Robert Salomon Morton Memorial Lecture (1998)
  10. ^ Gideon Klein Award

Remarks

  1. ↑ The University of Tübingen awarded Paul Cormann an honorary doctorate in 1913.
  2. ↑ Giessen and his corps brothers Jungclaus and Gerhart had the same doctoral supervisor.
personal data
SURNAME Giessen, Bill Cormann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Giessen, Bill (common short form)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 2010
Place of death Boston