Woldemar Voigt

Physicist, Academic

1850 – 1919

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Who was Woldemar Voigt?

Woldemar Voigt was a German physicist, who taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen. Voigt eventually went on to head the Mathematical Physics Department at Göttingen and was succeeded in 1914 by Peter Debye, who took charge of the theoretical department of the Physical Institute. In 1921, Debye was succeeded by Max Born.

Voigt was born in Leipzig, and died in Göttingen. He was a student of Franz Ernst Neumann. He worked on crystal physics, thermodynamics and electro-optics. His main work was the Lehrbuch der Kristallphysik, first published in 1910. He discovered the Voigt effect in 1898. The word tensor in its current meaning was introduced by him in 1899. Voigt profile and Voigt notation are named after him. He was also an amateur musician and became known as a Bach expert.

In 1887 Voigt formulated a form of the Lorentz transformation between a rest frame of reference and a frame moving with speed in the direction. However, as Voigt himself declared, the transformation was aimed for a specific problem and did not carry with it the ideas of a general coordinate transformation, as is the case in relativity theory.

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Born
Sep 2, 1850
Leipzig
Nationality
  • Germany
Profession
Education
  • Kant Russian State University
  • University of Königsberg
Lived in
  • Germany
Died
Dec 13, 1919
Göttingen

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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