Fritz Zerner

Friedrich "Fritz" Zerner , later Frédéric Zerner (born May 31, 1895 in Vienna , † April 3, 1951 in Marseille ) was an Austrian theoretical physicist specializing in hydrodynamics .

Zerner was the son of a doctor and studied physics at the University of Vienna , interrupted by military service in the First World War . In 1920 he received his doctorate with the work The resistance of a ball against uniform liquid movement . From 1920 to 1922 he was an assistant at the TH Charlottenburg and then until 1927 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna. He taught at the adult education center, was a senior commissioner in the community guard in Vienna and from 1934 unemployed. He was close to the socialists and was arrested by the national socialists after the annexation of Austria in 1938 . After several months in prison, he emigrated to France, where he was part of the Resistance during the German occupation . In 1947/48 he was a senior engineer at the Office National d'Etudes et Recherches Aéronautiques and from 1949 researched fluid mechanics for the CNRS at the University of Marseille .

He wrote the article about Maxwell's electrodynamics and electron theory in the Handbuch der Physik von Geiger / Scheel.

Zerner was married to the daughter Elizabeth Henriette Lazarsfeld (1903-1983) of the individual psychologist Sophie Lazarsfeld and the lawyer Robert Lazarsfeld. She worked as a translator and her brother Paul Felix Lazarsfeld , who was also close to the socialists, did his doctorate in theoretical physics at the same time as Zerner was still at the University of Vienna.

literature

• Entry in German Biographical Encyclopedia, Saur Verlag