Friedrich Pfaff

This article deals with the geologist and mineralogist Friedrich Pfaff. For the historian and librarian see Fridrich Pfaff .

Alexius Burkhard Immanuel Friedrich Pfaff (* July 17, 1825 in Erlangen ; † July 18, 1886 ibid) was a German geologist and professor of mineralogy at the University of Erlangen.

Life

Friedrich Pfaff was a son of the mathematician and astronomer Johann Wilhelm Andreas Pfaff and a grandson of Friedrich Burkhard Pfaff . His older brother was Hans Heinrich Ulrich Vitalis Pfaff , who like his father became a mathematics professor, his younger sister was Paula / Pauline Damajanti Pfaff, who later married the publicist Karl Brater and became the mother of the poet Agnes Sapper .

Friedrich Pfaff attended school in Erlangen and then studied mathematics, medicine, geology and mineralogy in Erlangen, Munich , Prague and Berlin . During his studies he became a member of the Bubenreuther Erlangen fraternity in the winter semester of 1842/43 . After obtaining his doctorate in medicine in 1848, he completed his habilitation in 1853 with a paper on the outline of the mathematical relationships of crystals for mineralogy and became a private lecturer at the University of Erlangen. In 1857 he constructed a compass goniometer for metallurgy and instruments for determining the hardness of minerals. He was the first geologist to investigate the Walberla , a witness mountain of the Weißjura near Forchheim .

In 1859 (according to other sources, 1863) Pfaff was appointed full professor of mineralogy at the University of Erlangen as the successor to Karl Georg von Raumer . From 1879 he was an extraordinary member of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. In 1882 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . Pfaff Island in Antarctica has been named after him since 1965 .

Act

In 1855 his work The Creation History was published with special consideration of the biblical account of creation . This anti-Darwinian book saw several editions. Pfaff endeavored to resolve discrepancies between the biblical account of creation and geological research. His work The Development of the World on an Atomistic Basis from 1883 had similar goals .

Numerous other publications by Pfaff are of a geological and empirical nature, such as The volcanic phenomena of 1872, studies of stratification faults or The Mechanism of Mountain Formation from 1880, in which he argued against Albert Heim's theory of shrinkage of the earth . Regional geologically he wrote a. a. on dolomites of the Franconian Jura (1851–52) and slate of the Glarus Alps , in crystallography on barite and feldspar, on thermal expansion and pressure effects of crystals. In contrast, he designed the works Grundriß der Mineralogie (Nördlingen 1860) and Grundriß der Geologie (Leipzig 1876) as textbooks .

The Astronomy touch his writings Geological objections to annoch thätige lunar volcanoes that confirmed only 100 years later, and the climate impact of Apsides the Earth's orbit. From a geophysical point of view, studies of glacier movements and the above mechanisms of mountain formation are of interest .

In addition to his specialist works, Pfaff also wrote, under the influence of Christian socio-political ideas, more popular scientific treatises, which bore titles such as the beginning and end of our sun and which appeared in part on the contemporary issues of Christian popular life . He also acted together with Emil Frommel as editor of the collection of lectures for the German people and wrote the first contribution for this series, Kraft und Stoff , himself.

literature

• Carl Wilhelm von Gümbel :  Pfaff, Alexius Burkhard Immanuel Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1887, p. 581 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Pfaff in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article in Meyer's Konversationslexikon from 1888
• Pfaff family (PDF file; 72 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Stricker: Medicinisch-Naturwissenschaftlicher Nekrolog of the year 1886 . In: Virchow's archive . tape 107 , no. 2 , p. 411-417 , doi : 10.1007 / BF01926060 .
2. ^ Cantor :  Pfaff, Johann Wilhelm Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1887, p. 593 f .; Günther Oestmann:  Pfaff, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 292 ( digitized version ).
3. ↑ Rudolf Seising et al. a., form, number, order. Studies on the history of science and technology , Verlag Franz Steiner 2004, ISBN 3-515-08525-4 , p. 405
4. ↑ Rudolf Fritsch: Karl Georg Christian von Staudt - Mathematical and Biographical Notes ( Memento of the original from May 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 2.7 MB) 
5. ↑ Ernst Höhne: The Bubenreuther. History of a German fraternity. II., Erlangen 1936, p. 153.
6. ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: Pfaffs Mikrogoniometer (No. 246) for expansion coefficients of metals, Erlangen 1872 )
7. ↑ Title information: Das Walberla. A Weissjura witness mountain in front of the Franconian Alb. Pfeil-Verlag ( Memento from August 26, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
8. ↑ see Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon Volume 15. Leipzig 1908, pp. 678–679
9. ↑ Prof. Dr. Friedrich Pfaff , member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
10. ↑ Friedrich Pfaff's membership entry at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on January 21, 2016.
11. ↑ cf. Birgit Seelhofer-Schilling, Corded reinforced concrete columns. Historical development , Vdf Hochschulverlag 2008, ISBN 3-7281-3223-3 , p. 40, note 25.