Schwarzschild

Karl Schwarzschild

Born: 9 Oct 1873 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Died: 11 May 1916 in Potsdam, Germany

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Schwarzschild published his first paper on the theory of orbits at the age of 16, then studied at Strasbourg, then at Munich where he obtained his doctorate with a dissertation on an application of Poincaré's theory of stable configurations of rotating bodies to tidal deformation of moons and to Laplace's origin of the solar system. At a meeting of the German Astronomical Society in Heidelberg in 1900 he discussed the possibility that space was non-Euclidean.

From 1901 until 1909 he was professor at Göttingen where he collaborated with Klein, Hilbert and Minkowski. Schwarzschild published on electrodynamics and geometrical optics during his time at Göttingen. From there he went to Potsdam but in 1914 he volunteered for military service. He served in Belgium, France and Russia.

While in Russia he wrote two papers on Einstein's relativity theory and one on Planck's quantum theory. These give the first exact solution of Einstein's general gravitational equations, giving an understanding of the geometry of space near a point mass. He also made the first study of black holes showing that bodies of sufficiently large mass would have an escape velocity exceeding the speed of light and so could not be seen.

However he contracted an illness while in Russia and died soon after returning home.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about Schwarzschild's work on general relativity

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. O Blumenthal, Karl Schwarzschild, Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung 26 (1918), 57-75.
  4. A S Eddington, Karl Schwarzschild, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 77 (1917), 314-319.
  5. A Einstein, Karl Schwarzschild, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1916 (1916), 768-770.
  6. E Hertzsprung, Karl Schwarzschild, Astrophysical Journal 45 (1917), 285-292. 
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