Giulio Racah

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Giulio (Yoel) Racah (born February 9, 1909 in Florence , Italy ; † August 28, 1965 ibid) was an Israeli-Italian mathematician and physicist .

Giulio Racah

Racah was trained in Florence and at the 1930 local university at Enrico Persico doctorate. Subsequently, he worked in Rome with Enrico Fermi and in Zurich with Wolfgang Pauli . In 1932 he became a professor at the University of Florence and in 1937 took a professorship at the University of Pisa .

In 1939 he had to give up his job due to the Italian race laws of 1938 and emigrated to Palestine . There he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem . In 1946 he became dean of the scientific faculty there. He later also became the rector and executive president of the university. Racah was instrumental in building up theoretical physics in Israel.

Racah's main areas of research were quantum physics and atomic spectroscopy . Today he is best known for the algebra he developed for coupling angular momentum with applications in atomic physics and nuclear physics . The parametrized energy values ​​that are important in complex chemistry are known as Racah parameters , as is the Racah notation used in atomic physics to describe the energy level of excited atoms.

With his cousin Ugo Fano he wrote the book Irreducible Tensorial Sets (Academic Press, New York) about it in 1959 . In 1958 Racah received the Israel Physics Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 1963 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He died in Florence in 1965 on the way to Amsterdam as a result of a gas leak in a defective heater.

The Racah Institute of Physics was founded in his honor in 1970, and the International Astronomical Union named the Racah crater on the moon after him.

literature

  • John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , Sp. 648.
  • I. Talmi: Giulio Racah (February 9, 1909 - August 28, 1965) . In: Nuclear Physics . 83, No. 1, July 1966, pp. 1-8. doi : 10.1016 / 0029-5582 (66) 90337-3 .

swell

  1. ↑ Fundamentals of Light Sources and Lasers - Chapter 3 Notes ( Memento from June 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Representation of the Paschen notation (Eng.)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Racah, Giulio
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Racah, yoel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Florence , Italy
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1965
Place of death Florence , Italy