Guido Beck

Who was Guido Beck?

Guido Beck was a physicist born in what was then the town of Reichenberg in the Kingdom of Bohemia, and is now Liberec in the Czech Republic. He studied physics in Vienna and received his doctorate in 1925, under Hans Thirring. He worked in Leipzig in 1928 as an assistant to Werner Heisenberg. A combination of the troubled political climate of Europe in the 1930s, his own restlessness, and the Nazi persecutions in Germany, made the Jewish-born Beck a traveler in those years. Until 1935 he worked in Cambridge with Ernest Rutherford, Copenhagen, Prague, United States and Japan.

In 1935, Beck was invited to work in the Soviet Union by Head of the Institute of Physics, Odessa University Yelpidifor Anempodistovich Kirillov. At the Odessa University Beck head of the Department of Theoretical Physics and gave a course of theoretical physics in German; lectures were simultaneously translated into Ukrainian by assistant Yu.G. Vekshtein. In 1936-1937 Beck head of the department of theoretical mechanics at the Institute of Water Transport Engineers in Odessa. Four of his Odessa students - VV Malyarov, MM Alperin, GV Skrotskii and PE Nemirovsky - became professors in Odessa and Moscow.