Erwin Madelung
Erwin Madelung ( born May 18, 1881 in Bonn, † August 1, 1972 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German physicist.
Life and work
Erwin Madelung grew up in Bonn, Rostock and Strasbourg, where his father Otto Madelung (1846-1926) Director of the Surgical University Clinic was before the Alsace became French again in 1918. He made his Abitur at the renowned Protestant Gymnasium in Strasbourg, which spawned numerous later high school teachers, as the graduate and 1914 winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Max von Laue ( 1879-1960 ) reported in his autobiography. Erwin Madelung is the younger brother of the chemist Walter Madelung (1879-1963) and the older aircraft engineer Georg Madelung ( 1889-1972 ). His half-sister Tussa (actually: Auguste Eleonore ) Madelung married in 1922 his Göttingen colleagues, the experimental physicist Robert Wichard Pohl ( 1884-1976 ).
Erwin Madelung studied physics in Kiel, Zurich and Strasbourg and received his PhD in 1905 in Göttingen at Hermann Theodor Simon ( 1870-1918 ) Dr. phil. After a nearly year-long world tour, he returned to the University of Göttingen and mainly dealt with the crystal structure of solids. In 1908 he became assistant to Eduard Riecke. In 1912 he completed his habilitation in Göttingen.
During this time he developed his namesake Madelung constant for the ion lattice, which characterizes the electrostatic interactions with all ions of the crystal for each type of crystal lattice. In 1918 he was appointed professor.
After brief professor in Kiel and Münster, he was appointed in 1921 as successor to Max Born at the University of Frankfurt am Main, where he was the Chair of Theoretical Physics held until 1949 and held until 1953 lectures. There he dealt primarily with issues of atomic physics and quantum mechanics. Here he developed the Madelung equations.
His son Otfried Madelung was also a professor of theoretical physics ( in Marburg).
Works
- Magnetization by fast running current operations with respect to Marconi wave detector. Göttingen, Univ., Faculty of Humanities, Diss, 1905.
- The mathematical tools of the physicist, Springer Verlag, Berlin 1922 Other conditions: . 1925, 1935, 1950, 1953, 1957, 1964.