Theodor Kaluza

Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza ( November 9, 1885 * incorporated in Wilhelmsthal (1899 to Opole ), Upper Silesia, † January 19, 1954 in Göttingen ) was a German physicist and mathematician. Along with Oskar Klein, he developed the Kaluza-Klein theory.

Academic Career

Kaluza was born into a German Catholic family from Upper Silesia. His youth was spent in Königsberg ( Prussia), where his father was a professor of English Max Kaluza. He studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at the Albertina and received his doctorate there on August 17, 1907 under the direction of Meyer on the subject The Tschirnhaustransformation algebraic equations with one unknown. In 1909 the Habilitation and he was appointed lecturer. In this position, he spent an unusually long time, ie 20 years before he was appointed in 1929 to a professorship at the University of Kiel. In 1935 he followed a call to Göttingen, where he taught until his retirement and researched.

Kaluza is best known for his original solution approach for a unified field theory that would unify gravitation and Maxwell's electrodynamics. The Court noted, for four-dimensional space-time of relativity theory a fifth dimension, which enabled the integration of Maxwell's equations. When Einstein theory learned that he was very impressed and wrote to Kaluza:

With the support of Einstein's work was published in 1921 in the business proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The great success of the evolving quantum mechanics was however in the coming years, this work gradually recede into the background of scientific interest. Einstein was cautious, but appreciatively:

Personality

Kaluza was an extraordinarily versatile educated, polyglot man ( he is said to have up to 17 languages ​​spoken or written, including Arabic, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Hungarian, etc. ). In addition, he was an unusually modest personality. In his rejection of the Nazi ideology, he never made ​​a secret, which is why his appeal to the Göttingen chair with difficulty, and by the protection of his Göttingen colleague Helmut Hasse was possible. From his private life, strange things were told: he is said to have taught as over 30 -year-old non-swimmer to swim just by reading a book and have actually dominated the first attempt in the water there.

Theodor Kaluza's son was the mathematician and professor Theodor Kaluza ( 1910-1994 ).

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