Martin J. Klein

Martin Jesse Klein ( born June 25, 1924 in New York City; † 28 March 2009 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) was an American physicist and science historian.

Life and work

Klein was born the son of a teacher pair in the Bronx and went to New York to the James Monroe High School ( a classmate was Leon Lederman ), which he completed in 1938. He studied physics at Columbia University (Bachelor in 1942, Master 1944) and, after military service from 1944 to 1946, at MIT, where he received his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1948. From 1949 he worked at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland (Ohio ), where he became professor of physics ( 1966/67, he was Chairman of the Physics Department ). 1952/53, he was at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin as a National Research Fellow and 1958/59 with a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics in Leiden, where he continued his work on physics history with the publication of the collected ( with Erwin Schrödinger ) works by Paul Ehrenfest began. 1967/68 he was again Guggenheim Fellow and from 1967 Professor of the History of Physics (and later Professor of Physics ) at Yale University. In 1971 he became chairman of the Department of Science History at Yale. From 1974 he was Eugene Higgins Professor for the History of Physics at Yale.

As a physicist, he worked on statistical mechanics and the theory of thin ferromagnetic layers.

Small dealt with the contributions Ehrenfests to statistical mechanics and early quantum theory, with the early days of quantum theory with Max Planck and Albert Einstein ( back in the early 1960s). He gave out the letters on wave mechanics of Schrödinger, Einstein, Lorentz and Planck in English translation and dealt with the origins of Schrödinger's wave mechanics. For the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, he wrote the article about Ehrenfest, Einstein, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. He examined the early work on the thermodynamics of Gibbs, his predecessor as professor of physics at Yale and one of the first major U.S. physicist, and the development of statistical mechanics at the Ludwig Boltzmann. He wrote the definitive biography of Ehrenfest.

In addition to the publication of the works of Ehrenfest, he was involved from 1988 to 1998 in the publishing of the volumes 3-6 of the Collected Works of Albert Einstein at Princeton University Press. The he edited volumes cover the years 1909-1917, ie the crucial years of the development of the general theory of relativity, the final form dates from 1916.

He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences ( 1977), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1979) and the Académie Internationale d' Histoire des Sciences in Paris (since 1971). In 2005 he received the first Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics of the American Physical Society.

Klein was married three times and had four daughters from different marriages.

Writings

• Paul Ehrenfest - The Making of a theoretical physicist. 2 vols. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1970-1985, ISBN 0-444-86948-4
• Physicists inaugural lectures in history. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 1993, ISBN 90-5356-057-2