Manfred Schroeder

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Manfred Schroeder, 1993 in Göttingen
Göttingen, Parkfriedhof Junkerberg, honor grave for Manfred Schroeder

Manfred Robert Schroeder (born July 12, 1926 in Ahlen ; † December 28, 2009 ) was a German theoretical physicist who mainly dealt with acoustics.

life and work

As a teenager, Schroeder worked as a radio tinkerer and, during the Second World War, worked as a radar operator for the Navy in the Netherlands. Schroeder studied mathematics (bachelor's degree in 1951) and physics at the University of Göttingen , where he at Erwin Meyer received his doctorate in 1952 (on the distribution of natural frequencies in cavities), and went in 1954 to the United States over the next 15 years at the ATT Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill worked in New Jersey (and was an external member until 1987), 1958 to 1969 as head of acoustics and language research. In 1969 he became a professor at the 3rd Physics Institute in Göttingen, where he became director after the death of Meyer and retired in 1991 .

He became known for investigating the acoustics of concert halls, which he improved, among other things, with special diffusers designed according to number theoretic principles . His first consultation in this area was for the Lincoln Center concert hall in New York in 1962, where he and colleagues developed, among other things, methods of measuring reverberation times. At Bell Labs, he also invented codes for data compression ( Linear Predictive Coding , Code Excited Linear Prediction ), which are used today, for example, in cell phones, and dealt with synthetic speech generation. Last but not least, he is known for several books that exemplarily and with didactic skill illustrate the applicability of mathematics (especially number theory, power function scaling laws for fractals ) in various areas. Schroeder also dealt with computer graphics.

Schroeder received the gold medal of the Acoustical Society of America , the Rayleigh Medal (Institute of Acoustics) of the British Institute of Acoustics and the Helmholtz Medal of the German Society for Acoustics . In 2004 he received the technology prize of the Eduard Rhein Foundation . He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986), the New York Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen . He was also an "External Scientific Member" of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

Schroeder held around 45 patents. He worked with Pierre Boulez on the planning of the acoustics in his research center at the Center Pompidou in Paris.

He was married and had three children.

Fonts

  • Number Theory in Science and Communication - With Applications in Cryptography, Physics, Digital Information, Computing, and Self-Similarity. Springer, 1984. 5th edition 2009.
  • Computer Speech: Recognition, Compression, Synthesis. Springer, 1999, ISBN 3-540-64397-4 .
  • Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise. Freeman, ISBN 0-7167-2357-3 .
  • Number theory and the real world. In: Mathematical Intelligencer. No. 4, 1985.
  • Number theory in physics. In: Physical sheets. , Vol. 50, 1994, pp. 1123-1128. doi : 10.1002 / phbl.19940501206
  • The acoustics of concert halls: Physics and Psychophysics , Physikalische Blätter, Volume 55, 1999, pp. 47–50, doi : 10.1002 / phbl.19990551110

literature

  • Ning Xiang, Gerhard M. Sessler (eds.): Acoustics, Information, and Communication: Memorial Volume in Honor of Manfred R. Schroeder. Springer, 2015.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Acustica Vol. 4, 1954, p. 45. In it he showed that, for example, in a cube with small disturbances at the edge, anomalies appear in the spectrum, which today can be understood as signs of chaotic behavior.
  2. ↑ J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. Vol. 57, 1975, p. 149
  3. ↑ with Bishnu Atal, G. Sessler: J. West Journal Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 40, 1966, p. 434. This led to a study on concert hall acoustics on behalf of the DFG with D. Gottlob, F. Siebrasse: J. Acoust. Soc. America, Vol. 56, 1974, p. 1195.
  4. ^ "New method of measuring reverberation time," J. Acoust. Soc. At the. 37, 409-412 (1965)
  5. ^ Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Comm. and Process., 1967, pp. 360-361, and with BS Atal: Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 49, 1970, pp. 1973-1986
  6. ↑ with Atal: Proc. Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 1978, pp. 573-576
  7. ^ Ning Xiang and Gerhard M. Sessler: Information, and Communication - Memorial Volume in Honor of Manfred R. Schroeder, Springer 2014
personal data
SURNAME Schroeder, Manfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schroeder, Manfred Robert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Awls
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 2009