Ernest D. Courant

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Ernest David Courant , born Ernst David Courant (born March 26, 1920 in Göttingen ; † April 21, 2020 in Ann Arbor , Michigan ), was a German-American physicist .

Life

Courant was the son of the mathematician Richard Courant and Nerina (Nina) Runges, a daughter of the mathematician Carl Runge , and therefore had numerous contacts with the exact sciences from an early age .

When the National Socialists came to power, the family (Courant had Jewish roots) moved to New York via England (Cambridge). He attended Fieldston School and studied physics at Swarthmore College from 1936 and received his doctorate in 1943 at the University of Rochester . From 1948 he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory , where he stayed until well after his retirement. From 1955 he was a permanent member, from 1960 Senior Scientist and since 1990 Distinguished Emeritus Scientist. From 1966 to 1986 he was also an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook . Among other things, he was visiting scholar at Fermilab (1968/69), CERN (1974), Cambridge University (1956), visiting professor at Princeton University (1950/51) and Yale University (1961/62).

Courant was a pioneer in the development of particle accelerators . In 1952, together with M. Stanley Livingston and Hartland Snyder, he developed the strong focusing principle for synchrotrons , which made it possible to hold the particle beams together and which was an important prerequisite for particle accelerators with ever higher energy. Shortly afterwards it turned out that the concept had already been discovered and patented by Nicholas Christofilos in 1949 , with whom an agreement was soon reached.

Courant had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1976 .

In 1987 he received the first Robert R. Wilson Prize from the American Physical Society and in 1986 the Enrico Fermi Award from the Department of Energy . He also received the Boris Pregel Prize from the New York Academy of Sciences.

Fonts

  • Early History of the Cosmotron and AGS at Brookhaven. In: Brown, Dresden, Hoddeson (Ed.): From Pions to Quarks. Particle Physics in the 1950s. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernest Courant Obituary - Ann Arbor, MI. In: dignitymemorial.com. Retrieved April 24, 2020 (English).
  2. ↑ Courant, Livingston, Snyder: The strong focussing synchrotron. In: Physical Review. Vol. 88, 1952, p. 1190.
personal data
SURNAME Courant, Ernest D.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Courant, Ernest David (full name); Courant, Ernst David (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Goettingen
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 2020
Place of death Ann Arbor , Michigan