August Beer

August Beer ( born July 31, 1825 Trier, † November 18, 1863 in Bonn ) was a German mathematician, chemist and physicist.

After a thorough knowledge of the trade school of his native city acquisition August Beer began the study of mathematics and the natural sciences in Trier, which he left in 1845. He became an assistant and staff at Julius Plücker in Bonn. There he received his doctorate in 1848 with its award-winning treatise De situ axium opti corum in Crystallis biaxibus at the Faculty of Philosophy and habilitated in 1850 as Assistant Professor. In 1854 he published the book "Introduction to the higher optics ", which, translated into many languages ​​, became the standard work on the theory of light. 1855 was August Beer as an associate professor in 1857 an ordinary.

He died at the age of only 38 years, while working on a comprehensive textbook in which he wanted to summarize the whole mathematical physics. The completed statements published after his death under the headings Introduction to the elasticity; the theory of magnetism and electrodynamics (1865) and Introduction to the mathematical theory of elasticity and capillarity (1869).

His main areas of work were electrostatics, elastomechanics, capillarity and in particular light absorption ( Lambert -Beer 's law) and photometry.