Sommerfeld

Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld

Born: 5 Dec 1868 in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia)
Died: 26 April 1951 in Munich, Germany

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Arnold Sommerfeld worked on wave mechanics and thermodynamics. He studied at Königsberg was an assistant at Göttingen and was taught by Hilbert, Hurwitz and Lindemann. He taught at Clausthal and then he became professor at the Technische Hochschule of Aachen.

In 1897 he began a 13 year study of gyroscopes woking on a 4 volume work jointly with Klein. In 1906 he became professor of theoretical physics at Munich and worked on atomic spectra. His work led him to replace the circular orbits of the Bohr atom with elliptical orbits, he also introduced the magnetic quantum number. He used statistical mechanics to explain the electronic properties of metals.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. M Born, Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 8 (1952), 275-296.
  4. W Schröder, Arnold Sommerfeld und Emil Wiechert, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 32 (1985), 77-93.
  5. Albert Einstein/Arnold Sommerfeld Briefwechsel (Basel, 1968).
  6. U Benz, Arnold Sommerfeld : Lehrer und Forscher an der Schwelle zum Atomzeitalter, 1868-1951 (Stuttgart, 1975). 
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