Willy Hartner

Willy Hartner ( born January 22, 1905 in Ennigerloh; † 16 May 1981 in Bad Homburg ) was a German science historian.

Hartner studied after high school in Bad Homburg at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Chemistry ( with graduate degrees ) and then astronomy and he was in 1928 when Martin Brendel in celestial mechanics PhD ( The perturbations of the planets in Gyldénschen coordinates as functions of the mean length). His main area of ​​research was the history of the natural sciences. He was very talented in languages ​​and also learned Arabic and Chinese for his work. From 1931 he was also a lecturer in Nordic languages ​​at the university. Among the influences in Frankfurt counted among other things, the historical mathematics seminar at Max Dehn ( which he sought refuge in 1938 to the persecution of Jews during Kristallnacht ), Paul Epstein, Ernst Hellinger and Carl Ludwig Siegel and ethnologist Leo Frobenius. In 1935 he was Visiting Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University under George Sarton, where he made ​​many international contacts. He returned to Germany, was freed on health grounds from military service and qualified as during the Second World War in Frankfurt. In 1943 he succeeded in Frankfurt the establishment of an Institute for the History of Science, which was later incorporated into the Department of Physics. Because of his well-known opposition to the Nazis, he was used by the Americans as an important liaison to rebuild the university, where he worked with Edward Hartshorne. In 1946 he became a full professor of History of Science. From 1959 to 1960 Hartner was rector of the University of Frankfurt. He was in the 1960s, been a guest professor at Harvard.

After his thesis he carried out extensive calculations on behalf of the Emergency Association of German Science, in order to calculate the contributions to the perihelion of Mercury from classical celestial mechanics (she was at that time one of the few experimentally verifiable predictions of general relativity by Albert Einstein), but which also because of the political events of 1933 could not be completed. From his contact with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm, he dealt with astronomy in ancient China and found that the standard given in the Chinese tradition dating of eclipses in the I Ching was wrong and based on a back calculation error. At Harvard, he dealt with the history of the lunar nodes and the astrolabe.

Later he worked on number systems among primitive peoples and wrote the mineralogist Julius Ruska a catalog of Arabic manuscripts on the history of science. It dealt with the reconstruction of astronomical knowledge of astrological manuscripts, handing down the astronomical knowledge of the ancient world about Islam back to the West, wrote posts about Arab history of science in the Encyclopedia of Islam and wrote, among other things, the gold horns of Gallehus.

At his institute was involved, among other things, the original ethnologist Hertha von Dechend as a secretary, librarian and assistant.

1971 Hartner was awarded the George Sarton Medal. 1971 bit 1978 he was president of the Academie International d' Histoire des Sciences. In 1968, he received the Medal of Hegel Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society ( 1935) and 1965 their associate, the Spanish Academia Real de buenas letras, the Accademia dei Lincei (1975 ), the Tuscan Academy of Science and Literature and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences ( 1980). He was a knight of the Legion of Honour (1975).

He was married to the Norwegian Else Eckhoff since 1937.

Writings

• The golden horns of Gallehus, Wiesbaden, F. Steiner 1969