Josef Meixner

Josef Meixner (April 24, 1908 in Percha near Starnberg – March 19, 1994 in Aachen, Germany) was a German theoretical physicist known for his work on the physics of deformable bodies, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, Meixner polynomials, Meixner-Pollaczek polynomials, and spheroidal wave functions.

Meixner began his studies in theoretical physics with Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in 1926. He was awarded his doctorate in 1931, with the submission of a thesis on the application of the Green function in quantum mechanics.

After a few years of teaching in high school, he became first an Assistant (1934) and, later, a Lecturer (1937) in theoretical physics at the University of Giessen. From 1939 to 1941 he was a Lecturer at the Humboldt University, Berlin. In 1942, he was appointed “Extraordinary” Professor of theoretical physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Rhine-Westfalian Institute of Technology, Aachen, Germany, being promoted to “Ordinary” Professor in 1949.

After Sommerfeld’s death in 1951, Meixner edited a volume and new editions of two other volumes of Sommerfeld’s six-volume Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik.

Meixner conducted research and taught graduate courses at the Institut für theoretische Physik of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen). Literature citations, as well as doctorates granted to his students, put Meixner at RWTH Aachen, or just Aachen, for years in each of the decades from the 1950s until his death in 1994. He was known for his work on the physics of deformable bodies (rheology), thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, Meixner polynomials, Meixner-Pollaczek polynomials, and spheroidal wave functions.

Sommerfeld, Arnold Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik. Band 5: Thermodynamik und Statistik. Herausgegeben von Fritz Bopp und Josef Meixner. (Diederich, 1952)

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