George Eugene Uhlenbeck

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Uhlenbeck (left), Kramers and Goudsmit

George Eugene Uhlenbeck (born December 6, 1900 in Batavia (today: Jakarta), Indonesia , † October 31, 1988 in Boulder , Colorado , USA ) was an American physicist of Dutch origin.

Life

Uhlenbeck's father served in the army of the Dutch East India Company and the family moved back to The Hague in the Netherlands when he was six years old. He studied chemical engineering at the Technical University of Delft, as he had initially received no university admission for lack of classical languages teaching, but moved shortly thereafter to the study of physics at the University of Leiden , where he still Hendrik Lorentz listened and 1923 at Paul Ehrenfest received his diploma . Since he had to earn his own living, he also taught at a girls' school and as a private teacher in Rome, the son of the Dutch ambassador there, where he also made contacts with Enrico Fermi . After that he was Ehrenfest's assistant in Leiden for two years, and it was during this time that his work on electron spin also fell. He received his doctorate in 1927 from the University of Leiden. He then held professorships in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan , where he was from 1927 to 1935 (most recently as Associate Professor), from 1935 to 1939 at the University of Utrecht , from 1939 to 1960 again at the University of Michigan and from 1960 at Rockefeller University in New York City , where he was Professor Emeritus from 1974. From 1943 to 1945 he was a scientist at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . In 1954/55 he was Lorentz Professor at the University of Leiden and in 1963/64 he was Van der Waals Professor at the University of Amsterdam .

In addition to various work on atomic and nuclear physics, he and Samuel Abraham Goudsmit postulated the existence of the electron spin in 1925 .

Among other things, the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process , a result of his occupation with statistical physics , is named after him .

In 1964 he was awarded the Max Planck Medal together with Samuel Abraham Goudsmit . In 1958 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh (Some fundamental problems of statistical physics). He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1931 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1955 . In 1957 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and in 1964 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1979 he received the Wolf Prize in Physics and in 1976 the National Medal of Science . In 1959 he was president of the American Physical Society.

He is Karen Uhlenbeck's father-in-law .

On July 5, 2001 the asteroid (9687) Uhlenbeck was named after him.

literature

  • Uhlenbeck Fifty Years of Spin: Personal Reminiscences , Physics Today, Vol. 29, 1976, pp. 43-48
  • Abraham Pais : George Uhlenbeck and the Discovery of Electron Spin , Physics Today, Vol. 41, 1989, pp. 34-40
  • EGD Cohen George E. Uhlenbeck and Statistical Mechanics , American Journal of Physics, Vol. 58, 1990, pp. 619-625

Web links

Commons : George Eugene Uhlenbeck  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Uhlenbeck, George Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Batavia , Indonesia
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1988
Place of death Boulder , Colorado , USA