Willy Hartner

Willy Hartner (born January 22, 1905 in Ennigerloh ; † May 16, 1981 in Bad Homburg in front of the height ) was a German natural science historian.

After graduating from high school in Bad Homburg, Hartner studied chemistry (with a diploma) at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and then astronomy, and he received his doctorate in celestial mechanics under Martin Brendel in 1928 ( The perturbations of the planets in Gylden's coordinates as functions of the mean Length ). His main area of ​​research became the history of natural sciences . He was very linguistically gifted and learned Arabic and Chinese for his work. From 1931 he was also lecturer for Nordic languages ​​at the university. The influences in Frankfurt included, among others, the mathematical history seminar around Max Dehn (whom he gave shelter to after the persecution of the Jews during the Reichskristallnacht in 1938 ), Paul Epstein , Ernst Hellinger and Carl Ludwig Siegel and the ethnologist Leo Frobenius . In 1935 he was visiting professor for the history of science at Harvard University under George Sarton , where he made many international contacts. He returned to Germany, was exempt from military service for health reasons and completed his habilitation in Frankfurt during the Second World War. In 1943 he succeeded in founding an institute for the history of natural sciences in Frankfurt, which was later incorporated into the Faculty of Physics . Due to his well-known opposition to the National Socialists, he was used by the Americans as an important liaison for the rebuilding of the university, where he worked with Edward Hartshorne . In 1946 he became a full professor for the history of science. From 1959 to 1960 Hartner was rector of the university in Frankfurt. He was visiting professor at Harvard several times in the 1960s.

After his dissertation, he carried out extensive calculations on behalf of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in order to calculate the contributions to the perihelion of Mercury from classical celestial mechanics (at that time it was one of the few experimentally verifiable predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity ), but that too could not be completed due to the political events around 1933. From his contact with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm he dealt with astronomy in ancient China and found that the customary dating of the eclipses in the I Ching, given in Chinese tradition, was based on a back calculation error. At Harvard, he studied the history of the lunar knots and the astrolabe .

Later he dealt with number systems in indigenous peoples and wrote a catalog of Arabic manuscripts on the history of natural science with the mineralogist Julius Ruska . He dealt with the reconstruction of astronomical knowledge from astrological manuscripts, the transmission of astronomical knowledge from antiquity via Islam back to the West, wrote articles on the history of Arab science in the Encyclopedia of Islam and wrote, among other things, about the gold horns of Gallehus .

The original ethnologist Hertha von Dechend worked at his institute as a secretary, librarian and assistant.

In 1971 Hartner was awarded the George Sarton Medal . From 1971 to 1978 he was President of the Academie International d'Histoire des Sciences. In 1968 he received the Hegel Medal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society (1935) and its associate in 1965 , the Spanish Academia Real de buenas letras, the Accademia dei Lincei (1975), the Tuscan Academy of Science and Literature and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences (1980). He was a Knight of the Legion of Honor (1975).

He was married to the Norwegian Else Eckhoff since 1937.

Fonts

• The gold horns from Gallehus, Wiesbaden, F. Steiner 1969

Web links

• Literature by and about Willy Hartner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary by Matthias Schramm
• http://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml?id=56375