Rudolf Luneburg

Rudolf Karl Luneburg ( born March 30, 1903 in Volkersheim ( Bockenem ); † August 19, 1949 in Great Falls ( Montana), USA, and in the U.S. beginning Lueneburg, later mostly Luneburg, also erroneously Luneberg ) was a German mathematician and physicist. As a professor of mathematics and optics, among other things, he taught at the Eye Institute at Dartmouth College. He is named after the retroreflective Luneburg lenses.

Curriculum vitae

Lüneburg studied in Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1930. On the run from the Nazis, he worked 1934-1935 as a physicist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and emigrated in 1935 to the United States. There he first worked in the Mathematics Department at New York University. From 1938 to 1945 he was employed in the research department of the Spencer Lens Company, a part of the American Optical Company, Rochester, New York. After a lectureship at Brown University in the summer of 1944, he went in 1946 permanently to the Dartmouth Eye Institute at Brown University, where he worked on the electromagnetic theory of optics and several articles and books published. From 1946 to 1948 he worked as a mathematician at the Institute for Mathematics and Mechanics, New York University teaching at the University of Marburg and the Technical University of Darmstadt. His last job was in 1949 as a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California.

1949 Lüneburg died in a car accident.

Works

• Rudolf Luneburg: The problem of the random walk with no direction limitation and the boundary value problem of potential theory. Dissertation, Department of Mathematics, Göttingen, May 20, 1930

• Published in: Mathematische Annalen. 104, 1931, pp. 700-738 ( Online)

• Rudolf Lüneburg: A remark on the proof of a theorem on almost periodic functions. In: Det Royal Danish Videnskabernes Selskab (ed.): Matematisk - Fysiske Meddelelser. 12, No. 3, 1932, pp. 1-7. Retrieved on 1 September 2010.
• Rudolf K. Luneberg: Mathematical theory of optics. Brown University, Lecture Notes, Providence, RI, 1944.

• Reprint: Rudolf K. Luneburg: Mathematical theory of optics. University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1964 ( foreword by E. Wolf, additional notes by M. Herzberger ).