Gregor Wentzel
Gregor Wentzel (born February 17, 1898 in Düsseldorf , † August 12, 1978 in Ascona ) was a German theoretical physicist .
Wentzel studied in Freiburg im Breisgau and Greifswald and from 1920 in Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld , where he also met Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg and received his doctorate in 1921. In 1922 he completed his habilitation in Munich (on the quantum theory of beta rays) and in 1926 became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leipzig .
Wentzel succeeded Erwin Schrödinger at the University of Zurich in 1928 and, together with Wolfgang Pauli , who became professor at the ETH Zurich in the same year , made Zurich an international center for theoretical physics . In 1933 his article "Wave Mechanics of Shock and Radiation Processes" appeared in the Handbuch der Physik. His “Introduction to the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields” from 1943 was the leading textbook until the revolution of quantum field theory by Richard Feynman , Julian Schwinger and others, which began in the late 1940s. In 1924 he found the path integral , later named after Richard Feynman, but the work was hardly noticed. During the war, he took over lectures from Wolfgang Pauli at the ETH. From 1948 until his retirement in 1969 he was a professor at the University of Chicago (then as professor emeritus until his death).
He was visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (1930), Purdue University (1947), Stanford University (1949), at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (1951) and at the University of California, Berkeley (1954) . In 1975 he received the Max Planck Medal . From 1959 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences .
With Hendrik Anthony Kramers and Léon Brillouin, Wentzel is one of the inventors of the WKB approximation in quantum mechanics.
Fonts
- Introduction to the quantum theory of wave fields, Vienna: Deuticke 1943
- Quantum theory of fields, Interscience 1949, Dover 2003
Web links
- Literature by and about Gregor Wentzel in the catalog of the German National Library
- Gregor Wentzel - ETH Library.
- Oral History interview transcript with Gregor Wentzel 3-5 February 1964. American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives.
- Gregor Wentzel 1898-1978 - A Biographical Memoir by Peter GO Freund, Charles J. Goebel, Yoichiro Nambu, and Reinhard Oehme. (PDF; 189 kB) National Academy of Sciences, 2009.
- Biography at the APS
- Gregor Wentzel in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig
- Günter Scharf: Gregor Wentzel. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Published in Annalen der Physik, Volume 69, 1922, pp. 335–368
- ↑ G. Wentzel, Zur Quantenoptik , Z. f. Physik, Volume 22, 1924, pp. 193-199
- ↑ S. Antoci, D.-E. Liebscher. The Third Way to Quantum Mechanics is the Forgotten First. Annales Fond. Broglie, 21, 1996, p. 349
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wentzel, Gregor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 17, 1898 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dusseldorf |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 12, 1978 |
| Place of death | Ascona |