Rudolf Kohlrausch

Rudolf Hermann Arndt Kohlrausch ( born November 6, 1809 in Göttingen, † March 8, 1858 in Erlangen, Germany ), son of the Royal Hanoverian general school director Heinrich Friedrich Theodor Kohlrausch, was a professor of physics. He was the father of physicist Wilhelm Friedrich Kohlrausch and Wilhelm Friedrich Kohlrausch.

Together with Wilhelm Eduard Weber, he determined the ratio of electrostatic and electromagnetic units and thus confirmed Maxwell's prediction ( 1865 )

To each newer electromagnetic unit system is based. He first reported in 1854 (Letter to Andreas von Ettingshausen ) preliminary results; the measurements were published in 1864 but by Weber.

He examined the " electrical residue " in the Leyden jar, in present-day understanding of the relaxation of the polarization of a glass, and led for the stretched exponential function

, which is today called " Kohlrausch function" or " Kohlrausch -Williams - Watts function". It was rediscovered in 1970 by Graham Williams and David Watts.