Werner Romberg

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Werner Romberg

Werner Romberg (born May 16, 1909 in Berlin ; † February 5, 2003 in Heidelberg ) was a German mathematician and physicist.

Romberg studied mathematics and physics in Heidelberg and Munich from 1928 and received his doctorate in 1933 at Munich University under Arnold Sommerfeld (dissertation: On the polarization of sewer beam light). In Munich he heard mathematics from Oskar Perron and Constantin Carathéodory, among others . In 1933 he preferred to emigrate to the Soviet Union as a " half-Jew " in the jargon of the National Socialists and was a theoretical physicist at the University of Dnipro (then Dnipropetrovsk) from 1934 to 1937 . In 1938 he went via Prague (Institute for Astrophysics) to Norway , where he became Egil Hylleraas' assistant in Oslo . He also worked briefly at the Technical University of Trondheim (NTH) with Johan Holtsmark (1894–1975), who built a Van-de-Graaff generator there. During the German occupation of Norway, he fled to Sweden ( Uppsala ). In 1941 he was expatriated from the German Reich and in 1943 his doctorate was revoked.

After the war he was a professor at the TH Trondheim from 1949 to 1968 (from 1960 as head of the applied mathematics department). In Norway he set up a research group for numerical analysis and was involved in the introduction of digital computers (such as the one of the first computer GIER at the NTH). From 1968 to 1977 he held the chair for mathematical methods in natural sciences and numerics at the University of Heidelberg . But he kept his Norwegian citizenship.

Romberg made contributions to the numerics of differential equations and numerical integration , for example Romberg's extrapolation method in 1955 (but there were previous works such as by Karl Kommerell and the civil engineers Mario Salvadori and Melvin L. Baron ).

literature

  • Stefanie Harrecker: Degraded doctors: the revocation of the doctorate at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich during the time of National Socialism , Munich: Utz, 2007 ISBN 978-3-8316-0691-7 . Short bio p. 346
  • Claude Brezinski, Some pioneers of extrapolation methods, in Adhemar Bultheel, Ronald Cools (Ed.), The birth of numerical analysis, World Scientific 2010, p. 10 (biography)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Romberg, Simplified Numerical Integration, Royal Norske Vid. Selsk. Forsk., Vol. 28, 1955, pp. 30-36
  2. ^ Claude Brezinski, Some pioneers of extrapolation methods, in Adhemar Bultheel, Ronald Cools (ed.), The birth of numerical analysis, World Scientific 2010
personal data
SURNAME Romberg, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 2003
Place of death Heidelberg