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Arnold Sommerfeld: A biography

Michael Eckert: Arnold Sommerfeld: Science, life and turbulent times 1868–1951. Berlin: Springer, 2013, xiv+471pp, €53.49 PB

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Notes

  1. See the Wikipedia entry for Arnold Sommerfeld for a complete listing of all his students by category.

  2. See The Mind of Modernism, edited and introduced by Mark S. Micale (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2004).

  3. Sommerfeld built with Wiechert a differential analyzer to solve the differential equations he had encountered in formulating a model to explain the local, experimentally determined, temperature distribution below the surface of the earth.

  4. I.e., the thesis dealt with complete, orthogonal sets of functions in terms of which arbitrary functions could be represented.

  5. The most notable experiment carried out in Sommerfeld's institute was the discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.

  6. It is to be noted that Sommerfeld was one of the youngest physicists invited to the 1911 Solvay Conference. A younger one was Albert Einstein (1879–1955).

  7. See Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" in the anthology, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge 2000).

  8. The Curator was the representative of the Prussian government at the university and its administrative head.

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Correspondence to S. S. Schweber.

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This paperback is a fine translation by Peter Artin of Michael Eckert’s Arnold Sommerfeld: Atomphysiker und Kulturbote 18681951, written in German and published by Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2013.

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Schweber, S.S. Arnold Sommerfeld: A biography. Metascience 24, 111–117 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-014-9935-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-014-9935-2

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