Arnold Sommerfeld Facts
Arnold Sommerfeld Facts
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Interesting Arnold Sommerfeld Facts: |
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Sommerfeld was a native of the region then known as East Prussia, which later became part of Germany. |
He studied mathematics and science at Albertina University, and gave his dissertation under Ferdinand von Lindemann. |
He went on to complete his studies and graduate with his doctorate in 1891 at only twenty-three years of age. |
Sommerfeld served his year of compulsory military service after finishing at university, but then continued to serve in the volunteer corps for the next eight years. |
He became an assistant to the widely known and respected mathematician Theodor Liebisch after returning to the University of Gottingen. |
Sommerfeld completed the requirements to become a teacher and eventually became a privatdozent at the University, lecturing on a wide variety of fields of mathematics. |
Some of the lectures he gave on partial differential equations eventually formed much of the material for Sommerfeld's textbook, Lectures on Theoretical Physics. |
Sommerfeld and a professor for whom he took lecture notes, Felix Klein, together wrote a four-volume textbook over the course of thirteen years; these texts covered both the theory and the applications of geophysics, astronomy, and their technological conveyances. |
Sommerfeld finished the fifth volume on his own at the request of Klein. |
Sommerfeld was appointed the Chair of Applied Mathematics in 1900 at Aachen University. |
He continued to teach for thirty-two years, and oversaw the educations, dissertations, and research of a number of notable physicists. |
Sommerfeld's early appreciation for Albert Einstein's then-somewhat new theory of relativity helped propel it into more of an accepted status in the scientific community, as it had originally not received much recognition. |
Sommerfeld actually took over as the chair of the DPG after Einstein. |
Apart from his teaching and contributions to leading young physics students to their later studies, Sommerfeld introduced both the second quantum number and the fourth quantum number, the azimuthal quantum number and the spin quantum number, respectively. |
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