Carl Hermann (physicist)
Carl Hermann (born June 17, 1898 in Lehe (Bremerhaven) ; † September 12, 1961 in Marburg ) was a German physicist and professor of crystallography .
Life
Carl Hermann came from a pastor's family that dates back to the Reformation. During his studies he was shaped by the physicist Max Born , with whom he received his doctorate in 1923 in Göttingen , and by his study contact with Werner Heisenberg .
This was followed by his assistant years at PP Ewald in Stuttgart from 1925 to 1935, where he got to know Laue 's discovery of X-ray interference in crystals . In 1931 he completed his habilitation in Stuttgart, where he also developed the Hermann Mauguin symbols with C. Mauguin to describe the 32 crystal classes and 230 spatial groups that are used worldwide today in crystallography and related sciences. Together with Paul Peter Ewald , he wrote the “ structure report ”, which has developed into a reference work for all structures researched.
In 1929 he was the first to list two-sided surface ornaments (also treated by Leonhard Weber and Heinrich Heesch at about the same time ).
With the establishment of the NSDAP , he had to leave the university because he refused political activity in their favor and did not make a corresponding commitment. Hermann went to the IG-Farbenindustrie in Ludwigshafen am Rhein , where he edited a series of publications with Brill , Grimm and Peters on the fine construction of crystalline matter, which contains various types and possibilities of chemical bonding . Here he and his wife Eva Hermann were later arrested and sentenced to long imprisonment for protecting countless Jewish fellow citizens from deportation by helping them to escape. Only his fame as a scientist and the intervention of his friends saved them from death sentence.
At the end of the war he was liberated and rehabilitated. For a short time he worked as a lecturer at the TH Darmstadt and in 1947 was appointed to the new chair for crystallography at the Philipps University in Marburg . There he led further series of studies and also described symmetry possibilities in spaces of all dimensions .
The German Society for Crystallography awards the Carl Hermann Medal as the highest honor .
On January 19, 1976, Hermann was posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations , while his wife was still alive.
literature
- Mauritius Renninger: Hermann, Carl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 662 ( digitized version ).
- Hermann, Carl; Hermann, Eva . In: Daniel Fraenkel, Jackob Borut (Ed.): Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations. Germans and Austrians . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2005, pp. 148-149 ISBN 3-89244-900-7 .
- Angela Borgstedt: Eva (1900-1997) and Carl Hermann (1898-1961) - two Quakers from Mannheim helped Jews . In: Angela Borgstedt et al. (Ed.): Courage proven. Resistance biographies from the southwest (= writings on political regional studies of Baden-Württemberg , published by the State Center for Political Education Baden-Württemberg, vol. 46), Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 9783945414378 , pp. 229-238.
Web links
- Biographical entry Righteous Among the Nations , Yad Vashem , accessed March 12, 2019
Individual evidence
- ↑ Burckhardt Symmetry of Crystals , 1988, p. 149
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hermann, Carl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German physicist, professor of crystallography |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 17, 1898 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lehe (Bremerhaven) |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 12, 1961 |
| Place of death | Marburg |