Curated category
Academic staff of the University of Göttingen
- Karl BarthKarl Barth appeared on the cover of Time magazine on the 20th of April 1962 - a Swiss theologian whose arguments about God had somehow broken out of…
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated…
- Christian Gottlob HeyneChristian Gottlob Heyne was born on the 25th of September 1729 in Chemnitz, Saxony, the son of a poor weaver who had fled Silesia to preserve his Protestant…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed.
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years.
- Jacob GrimmJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most…
- Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a small town in the Margraviate of Moravia, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned.
- Paul DiracPaul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on the 8th of August 1902 in Bristol, England, and died on the 20th of October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida.
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee…
- 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…
- Max BornMax Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had completed nearly three decades earlier. The delay was not an oversight.
- Emmy NoetherIn a joint faculty meeting at the University of Göttingen, one professor protested aloud: "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university…
- Johann Matthias GesnerJohann Matthias Gesner was born on the 9th of April 1691 in Roth an der Rednitz, a small town near Ansbach in the Principality of Ansbach.
- 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…
- Walther NernstWalther Nernst drove a car with a cylinder of nitrous oxide bolted to it, injected directly into the carburetor for extra power. This was not a stunt.