Franz Ernst Neumann (nonfiction)

Franz Ernst Neumann by Carl Steffeck (1886).

Franz Ernst Neumann (11 September 1798 – 23 May 1895) was a German mineralogist, physicist and mathematician.

His earlier papers were mostly concerned with crystallography, and the reputation they gained him led to his appointment as Privatdozent at the University of Königsberg, where in 1828 he became extraordinary, and in 1829 ordinary, professor of mineralogy and physics. His 1831 study on the specific heats of compounds included what is now known as Neumann's Law: the molecular heat of a compound is equal to the sum of the atomic heats of its constituents.

Devoting himself next to optics, he produced memoirs which earned him a high place among early searchers of a true dynamical theory of light. In 1832, by the aid of a particular hypothesis as to the constitution of the ether, he reached by a rigorous dynamical calculation results agreeing with those obtained by Augustin Louis Cauchy, and succeeded in deducing laws of double refraction closely resembling those of Augustin-Jean Fresnel.

Later, Neumann attacked the problem of giving mathematical expression to the conditions holding for a surface separating two crystalline media, and worked out from theory the laws of double refraction in strained crystalline bodies. He also made important contributions to the mathematical theory of electrodynamics, and in papers published in 1845 and 1847 established mathematically the laws of the induction of electric currents. His last publication, which appeared in 1878, was on spherical harmonics (Beiträge zur Theorie der Kugelfunctionen).

With the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi, he founded in 1834 the mathematisch-physikalisches Seminar which operated in two sections, one for mathematics and one for mathematical physics. Not every student took both sections. In his section on mathematical physics Neumann taught mathematical methods and as well as the techniques of an exact experimental physics grounded in the type of precision measurement perfected by his astronomer colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (nonfiction)
• Augustin Louis Cauchy (nonfiction)
• Alfred Clebsch (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
• Augustin-Jean Fresnel (nonfiction)
• Carl Gustav Jacobi (nonfiction)
• Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
• Light (nonfiction)
• Mathematician (nonfiction)
• Woldemar Voigt (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
• Friedrich Heinrich Albert Wangerin (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
• Christian Samuel Weiss (nonfiction) - Doctoral advisor

External links:

• Franz Ernst Neumann @ Wikipedia