Gerhard Hoffmann

Gerhard Hoffmann (4 August 1880 – 18 June 1945) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he contributed to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club.

Hoffmann studied at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, the Universität Leipzig, and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He received his doctorate at Bonn, in 1906, under Walter Kaufmann. In 1908, he became Kaufmann’s teaching assistant at the Albertus-Universität Königsberg, where he completed his Habilitation in pure and applied physics in 1911.

In 1917, Hoffmann became an ausserordentlicher Professor (extraordinarius professor) and worked on precision measurement of radioactivity and research in cosmic rays. From 1928-1937, as successor to Gustav Hertz, he was ordentlicher Professor (ordinarius professor) at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. In 1937 he succeeded Peter Debye and became ordinarius professor of experimental physics at the University of Leipzig, a position he held until his death in 1945.

In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner, who had in July of that year fled to The Netherlands and then went to Sweden. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.

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