Franz Ernst Neumann

Franz Ernst Neumann
Franz Ernst Neumann. Portrait by Carl Steffeck (1886)
Born	(1798-09-11)11 September 1798 Joachimsthal, Holy Roman Empire
Died	23 May 1895(1895-05-23) (aged 96) Königsberg, German Empire
Residence	Germany
Nationality	Germany
Fields	Physicist, Mineralogist
Institutions	Königsberg University
Alma mater	University of Berlin
Doctoral advisor	Christian Samuel Weiss
Doctoral students	Woldemar Voigt, Alfred Clebsch, Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, Friedrich Heinrich Albert Wangerin
Known for	Neumann's Law
Notable awards	Copley Medal (1886)

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

Neumann was born in Joachimsthal, Margraviate of Brandenburg, near Berlin. In 1815 he interrupted his studies at Berlin to serve as a volunteer in the Hundred Days against Napoleon, and was wounded in the Battle of Ligny. Subsequently he entered Berlin University as a student of theology, but soon turned to scientific subjects. 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. In studying double refraction, with his deduction of the elastic constants (on which the optical properties depend) Neumann employed the assumption that the symmetry of the elastic behavior of a crystal was equal to that of its form. In other words, he assumed that the magnitudes of the components of a physical property in symmetric positions are equivalent. This assumption substantially reduced the number of independent constants and greatly simplified the elastic equations. However, four decades passed before Neumann elaborated his application of symmetry in a course on elasticity in 1873. This principle was later formalized by his student Woldemar Voigt (1850–1918) in 1885: ‘‘the symmetry of the physical phenomenon is at least as high as the crystallographic symmetry,’’ which became a fundamental postulate of crystal physics known as ‘‘Neumann’s principle’’. In 1900, Voigt attributed this principle to Neumann’s 1832 paper even though, at most, all that was present in that work was an implicit assumption that the symmetry of the phenomenon was equal to that of the crystal. Bernhard Minnigerode (1837–1896), another student of Neumann, first expressed this relation in written form in 1887 in the journal Neues Jahrb. Mineral Geol. Paleontol. (Vol. 5, p. 145).