Alfred Landé

Alfred Landé
Alfred Landé in 1940
Born	(1888-12-13)13 December 1888 Elberfeld, German Empire
Died	30 October 1976(1976-10-30) (aged 87) Columbus, Ohio
Nationality	German/American
Fields	Quantum mechanics
Alma mater	University of Munich
Known for	Born–Landé equation

Alfred Landé (13 December 1888 – 30 October 1976) was a German-American physicist known for his contributions to quantum theory. He is responsible for the Landé g-factor and an explanation of the Zeeman Effect.

Alfred Landé was born on 13 December 1888 in Elberfeld, Rhineland, Germany, today part of the city of Wuppertal.

In 1913 Landé was sent by Arnold Sommerfeld, his thesis advisor at the University of Munich, to be a special assistant for physics to David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen, to replace Paul Peter Ewald, whom Sommerfeld had sent to the same position in 1912. There, Landé also came in close contact with Max Born. In physics, it was the era of the Bohr atom model. The leaders of Göttingen science included many greats that Landé was to come in contact with including Hilbert, Edmund Landau, Carl Runge and Ludwig Prandtl (the noted aerodynamics theoreticist). Also Niels Bohr and Hendrik Lorentz visited Göttingen frequently.

Landé obtained his doctorate under Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, two weeks prior to the start of the First World War. He joined the Red Cross and served for two years on the eastern front before being invited by Max Born to join him at the Artillery Testing Commission, one of the few scientific sections of the army. Apart from their work on artillery location by sound ranging, they began to examine the cohesive forces and compressibility of crystals. This work led to the unexpected result that the electron trajectories in atoms were not at all like planetary orbits, which at the time was the usual understanding of the electron in an atom.