Theodor Meyer (physicist)
Theodor Meyer (born July 1, 1882 in Bevensen ; † March 8, 1972 ) was a German mathematician , physicist and teacher .
His parents, Theodor Meyer and Anna Mertens Meyer, ran a hotel. From 1892 he attended the Johanneum High School in Lüneburg . While he was doing his military service, he attended mathematics lectures by Gottlob Frege , August Gutzmer and Carl Johannes Thomae at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena .
In 1902 he moved to the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, and studied four semesters with the mathematicians Ferdinand Georg Frobenius , Friedrich Robert Helmert , Georg Hettner , Johannes Knoblauch , Rudolf Lehmann-Filhés , Edmund Landau , Friedrich Schottky and Hermann Amandus Schwarz as well as with the Physicists Otto Lummer and Emil Warburg and the astronomers Julius Bauschinger and Wilhelm Foerster . In 1904 he moved to the Georg-August University of Göttingen , where he attended the lectures of the mathematicians Constantin Carathéodory , Gustav Herglotz , David Hilbert , Felix Klein , Wilhelm Lexis , Carl Runge and Ernst Zermelo , and those of the physicists Max Abraham , Hermann Minkowski and Ludwig Prandtl , Eduard Riecke , Woldemar Voigt and Emil Wiechert , the astronomer Martin Brendel and the philosopher Edmund Husserl . With these teachers he had the best possible education in mathematics and physics at the time. After he had passed his mathematics exam in Göttingen in July 1905, Prandtl invited him to the Institute for Applied Mechanics and offered him a project on theoretical gas dynamics for his doctoral thesis . In 1908 he wrote his doctoral thesis on two-dimensional movement processes in a gas that flows at supersonic speed .
Shortly afterwards he was called up for military service again and at the beginning of the First World War he fought as captain of the infantry on the Western Front in Liège and Antwerp and then in Ypres , where he was wounded. In early 1915 he received the news that mythologists and experimental theologians were being sought to develop new methods of attack - which turned out to be meteorologists and experimental physicists. That brought him together with Fritz Haber , who was preparing the chlorine gas attack in the Second Battle of Flanders in April 1915. A bullet hit him in the knee and Haber transported him to the military hospital. After his release he was employed by Haber to hold gas courses for officers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem. In March 1916 he came to Army High Command B and served as a war gas specialist. About two months before the end of the war, he asked Prandtl about work in Göttingen. Prandtl planned a supersonic wind tunnel for projectiles, competing with Carl Cranz . Meyer was asked to design a Laval nozzle , using Adolf Steichen's graphic hodograph method. After the war was lost, continuing to work on it was out of the question.
He attended courses to become a university professor and began teaching in April 1919 at the Werner Siemens Realgymnasium in Berlin. From November 1920 he also found employment at the AEG turbine factory.
He married Frieda Büscher Koopmann and lived at Meranerplatz 1 in Schöneberg. Her daughter Hannelore (born March 30, 1924) died on August 25, 1942 in the Reich Labor Service. The Realgymnasium was closed by the National Socialists in 1935. After they were bombed out in Berlin, the family moved into the family house in Bad Bevensen, where he taught first as a math and physics teacher at the secondary school and later at the Johanneum Lüneburg .
The Prandtl-Meyer angle, flow and expansion are named after him.
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Meyer, Theodor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German mathematician, physicist and teacher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 1, 1882 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bad Bevensen |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 8, 1972 |