Joseph O. Hirschfelder

Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder (born May 27, 1911 in Baltimore , Maryland , † March 30, 1990 in Madison , Wisconsin ) was an American theoretical chemist and physicist . He dealt with a wide range of areas of physical and theoretical chemistry , such as chemical kinetics, applications of quantum mechanics in chemistry, combustion, nuclear weapon explosions, kinetic gas theory, forces between molecules, structure of liquids, laser chemistry.

Life

The family immigrated to the USA from Germany in 1843. His father Arthur was a medical doctor at Johns Hopkins University and later a professor of pharmacology at the University of Minnesota , his grandfather the first professor of medicinal chemistry at Stanford University . Hirschfelder's father set up a chemistry laboratory for him at the age of five and raised him as a teenager to support his chemical research.

Hirschfelder studied from 1927 at the University of Minnesota and from 1929 at Yale University natural sciences. He felt more drawn to theory and went to Princeton University for his doctorate , where he was a student of Eugene Paul Wigner (with whom he published in 1935) and of Henry Eyring and Hugh S. Taylor (in chemistry).

In 1936 he received his doctorate under Eyring and Taylor and then spent a year as a post-doctoral student at the Institute for Advanced Study under John von Neumann , but during this time continued to work with Eyring and others on various questions of theoretical chemistry, in particular the application of quantum mechanics to the Calculation, for example, of the energy levels of molecules and reaction rates, but also e.g. B. with the structure of liquids, polarizability of the hydrogen molecule. In 1937 he went to the University of Wisconsin – Madison , where he was an instructor in physics and chemistry in 1940 and an assistant professor in the chemistry department in 1941. During this time he was interested in the forces between molecules in gases.

From 1942 he was in war research, initially on internal ballistics. In 1944/45 he was group leader in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and in 1945/46 he was head of the theoretical physics group at the Naval Ordinance Test Station in Inyokern , California and was involved in a senior scientific role in nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll in 1946. He worked with Hans Bethe and John Magee on the dynamics of nuclear weapons explosions (fireball formation, shock waves), fall-out prediction, and other physical problems associated with the tests.

In 1946 he went back to the University of Wisconsin as a professor of chemistry and stayed there until his retirement. There he founded the University's Naval Research Laboratory, which in 1959 became the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry (TCI) (at a time when its activity was greatly expanded through participation in the US space program). In 1959 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Right from the start, he attached great importance to numerical calculations and dealt with combustion processes and flame spread and the numerical methods required for their investigation (see also BDF method ).

He later worked at his institute on research into the forces between molecules, with various problems from NASA's space program and, in the 1970s, with physical and chemical questions that arose from laser research and related nonlinear optics. During this time he worked extensively with the University of California, Santa Barbara .

He had 39 doctoral students at the University of Wisconsin, including Charles Francis Curtiss and Robert Byron Bird . Since 1953 he was married to the mathematics professor Elizabeth Stafford Sokolnikoff .

Honors and memberships

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1953), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1959), the Royal Society of Chemistry (1981) and the Royal Norwegian Academy of Sciences (1965). He received honorary degrees from Marquette University and the University of Southern California. In 1976 he received the National Medal of Science and in 1966 the Peter Debye Award . In 1966 he received the Edgerton Gold Medal from the Combustion Institute.

In 1991 the University of Wisconsin founded the Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in theoretical chemistry.

Fonts

• with Charles F. Curtiss, R. Byron Bird The Molecular Theory of Gases and Liquids , Wiley 1954, 2nd edition 1964 (Russian translation 1961)
• with CF Curtiss: The theory of flame propagation , J. Chem. Phys., Volume 17, 1949, pp. 1076-81
• with other The effects of atomic weapons , Los Alamos National Laboratory 1950
• with Curtiss Integration of stiff equations , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 38, 1952, 235-243.

Web links

• Biography at the National Academy of Sciences by Byron Bird, Charles F. Curtiss, Phillip R. Certain
• Obituary in the NY Times

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Joseph O. Hirschfelder at academictree.org, accessed on February 12, 2018.
2. ^ The work Hirschfelder, Curtiss Integration of stiff equations , Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Volume 38, 1952, pp. 235-243 was one of the earliest publications on singular perturbation theory