George Uhlenbeck

George Eugene Uhlenbeck ( born December 6, 1900 in Batavia ( now Jakarta ), Indonesia, † October 31, 1988 in Boulder, Colorado, USA ) was an American physicist of Dutch origin.

Uhlen Beck's father served in the army of the Dutch East India Company and the family moved back to the Netherlands in The Hague, when he was six years old. He studied chemical engineering at the Technical University of Delft, as he had initially received no university admission due to lack of classical languages ​​teaching, but moved shortly thereafter to the study of physics at the University of Leiden, where he still Hendrik Antoon Lorentz heard and 1923 with Paul Ehrenfest received his diploma. Since he had to earn his own living, he taught the way to a girls' school and a private tutor in Rome the son of the Dutch ambassador, where he established contacts with Enrico Fermi. He then spent two years assistant to Ehrenfest in Leiden, and at this time was also his work on the electron spin. He received his doctorate in 1927 at the University Leiden. He was then professor in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, where he was from 1927 to 1935 ( most recently as Associate Professor ), from 1935 to 1939 at the University of Utrecht, 1939-1960 once again at the University of Michigan and from 1960 at the Rockefeller University in New York City, where he was Professor Emeritus in 1974. 1943 to 1945 he was a scientist at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1954/55 he was Lorentz Professor at the University of Leiden and 1963/64, it was Van der Waals professor at the University of Amsterdam.

In addition to various work on atomic and nuclear physics, he postulated in 1925, together with Samuel Abraham Goudsmit the existence of the electron spins.

Among other things named after him is the Ornstein - Uhlenbeck process, a result of his employment with statistical physics.

In 1964 he was awarded, together with Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, the Max Planck Medal. In 1958 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh ( Some fundamental problems of statistical physics ). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1955. In 1979 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1976 and the National Medal of Science. In 1959 he was president of the American Physical Society.

He is the father of Karen Uhlenbeck.

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