Curated playlist
Academic staff of ETH Zurich
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Alfred KleinerAlfred Kleiner sent back Albert Einstein's doctoral dissertation with a single criticism: it was too short. Einstein added one sentence and resubmitted. Kleiner accepted it without further comment. That exchange appears in Carl Seelig's…
- Carl JungCarl Gustav Jung was born on the 26th of July 1875 in Kesswil, a small village in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, the first child his parents would raise to adulthood after two stillbirths and the early death of a son named Paul. That already…
- Heinrich Jacob GoldschmidtHeinrich Jacob Goldschmidt was born on the 12th of April 1857 in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and he died on the 20th of September 1937 in Oslo. Between those two dates, he crossed borders repeatedly, building a career…
- Hermann MinkowskiHermann Minkowski died of appendicitis on the 12th of January 1909 in Göttingen. He was forty-four years old. The mathematician who had quietly reshaped how physicists think about the universe was gone, and his closest friend, David…
- Hermann WeylWhenever Michael Atiyah turned his attention to a mathematical topic, he kept running into the same name. He found that Hermann Weyl had already been there before him. Freeman Dyson placed Weyl in a category almost no one else could enter.…
- Marcel GrossmannMarcel Grossmann was born on the 9th of April, 1878, in Budapest, into a Jewish family that had deep roots in the Swiss city of Zurich. His father managed a textile factory. His family background seems worlds away from the frontiers of…
- Jacob BurckhardtJacob Burckhardt once turned down the most prestigious history chair in Germany, the very seat held by his own teacher, Leopold von Ranke, at the University of Berlin, and went back to Basel instead. That choice, made in 1872, says almost…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been attached to a unit of measurement, a lunar crater, a minor planet, and more than a…
- Otto SternOtto Stern, born on the 17th of February 1888 in Sohrau, in the German province of Silesia, became one of the most influential experimental physicists of the twentieth century. He earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943, yet his path to…