Arthur Gordon Webster

Arthur Gordon Webster ( born November 28, 1863 in Brookline, Massachusetts, † May 15, 1923 in Worcester, Massachusetts ) was an American physicist.

Webster studied at the Harvard University Mathematics and Physics with the completion in 1885 as top of his class. In the same year he continued his studies at the University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1890, Hermann von Helmholtz. During this time he also studied in Paris and Stockholm. In 1892, he was the successor of Albert Abraham Michelson Professor of Physics at Clark University, where he received a full professorship in 1900. The Clark University was at that time a leading training center for physics in the United States. In 1923, he shot himself with a revolver. In a farewell letter he complained to have landed with his research at an impasse. Webster was the theory of relativity and the nascent quantum theory with skepticism. One reason was probably also the fear that the new president of Clark University would after the mathematics faculty also include the physics faculty.

Webster worked both experimentally and theoretically. His lectures in theoretical physics published in book form, and were then in the USA, some of the first such textbooks in their respective fields. He developed a device for measuring the sound intensity and conducted research on the roundabout. He is best known today as the founder of the American Physical Society ( APS), which was founded on his invitation of twenty physicists on 20 May 1899 in Columbia University. 1903 Webster President of the APS and the National Academy of Sciences was recorded.

At Clark University, he had 27 students. In 1898 he was Colloquium Lecturer of the American Mathematical Society ( AMS) (The partial differential equations of wave propagation ).

Writings

• Theory of electricity and magnetism, being lectures on mathematical physics, London, Macmillan 1897, Online
• The dynamics of particles and of rigid, elastic and fluid bodies: being lectures on mathematical physics, Leipzig, Teubner 1912 Online
• The Partial Differential Equations of Mathematical Physics, 1927 ( posthumously ), 2nd edition 1933 Teubner (Editor Samuel J. Plimpton, Dover reprint 1966)