Erwin Madelung

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Erwin Madelung's grave

Erwin Madelung (born May 18, 1881 in Bonn ; † August 1, 1972 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German physicist.

life and work

Erwin Madelung grew up in Bonn , Rostock and Strasbourg , where his father Otto Madelung (1846–1926) was the director of the surgical university clinic before Alsace became French again in 1918. He made his Abitur at the renowned Protestant grammar school in Strasbourg, which later produced numerous university teachers. Erwin Madelung is the younger brother of the chemist Walter Madelung (1879–1963) and the older of the aircraft engineer Georg Madelung (1889–1972). His half-sister Tussa (actually: Auguste Eleonore) Madelung married his Göttingen colleague in 1922, the experimental physicist Robert Wichard Pohl (1884–1976).

Erwin Madelung studied physics in Kiel , Zurich and Strasbourg and obtained his doctorate in 1905 in Göttingen under Hermann Theodor Simon (1870–1918). phil. After traveling around the world for almost a year, he returned to the University of Göttingen and mainly dealt with the crystal structure of solids. In 1908 he became Eduard Riecke's assistant . In 1912 he completed his habilitation in Göttingen. During this time he developed the Madelung constant for ion lattices , named after him , which characterizes the electrostatic interactions with all ions of the crystal for each type of crystal lattice. In 1918 he was appointed professor after during the First World War in Pioneer Regiment 35 had served.

After brief professorships in Kiel and Münster , he was appointed to the University of Frankfurt in 1921 as successor to Max Born , where he held the chair for theoretical physics until 1949 and lectured until 1953. There he mainly dealt with topics of atomic physics and quantum mechanics . Here he developed the Madelung equations .

In 1923 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . Since 1942 he was a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

His son Otfried Madelung was also a professor of theoretical physics (in Marburg).

Works

  • Magnetization through fast current processes with regard to Marconi's wave detector . Göttingen, Univ., Phil. Fak., Diss., 1905.
  • The mathematical tools of the physicist , Springer Verlag, Berlin 1922, ISBN 978-3-662-41679-2 . Further editions: 1925, 1935, 1950, 1953, 1957, 1964.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Margit Szöllösi-Janze , Fritz Haber: 1868–1934; Eine Biographie , Beck-Verlag, Munich 1998, pp. 327–329 ( online ), accessed January 26, 2015
  2. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 158.
  3. ^ Members of the HAdW since it was founded in 1909. Erwin Madelung. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, accessed on June 19, 2016 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Madelung, Erwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1972
Place of death Frankfurt am Main