Karl Herzfeld
| Karl Herzfeld | |
|---|---|
Regina and Karl, at Regina's graduation 1938
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| Born |
February 24, 1892 Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | June 3, 1978 (aged 86) Washington DC, U.S. |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | Austrian-American |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions |
University of Munich Johns Hopkins University The Catholic University of America |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna |
| Doctoral advisor | Friedrich Hasenöhrl |
| Doctoral students |
John Archibald Wheeler Walter Heitler |
| Known for | Kinetic theory, ultrasonics |
| Influenced | Joseph Weber |
Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld (February 24, 1892 – June 3, 1978) was an Austrian-American physicist.
Herzfeld was born in Vienna during the reign of the Habsburgs over the Austro-Hungarian Empire. "He came from a prominent, recently assimilated Jewish family." His father was a physician and ordinarius professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Vienna. His mother, Camilla née Herzog, was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and sister of the organic chemist R. O. Herzog.
In 1902, when Herzfeld was 10 years old, he was enrolled in the private Gymnasium Schottengymnasium, which was run by the Benedictine Order of the Roman Catholic Church and had its name derived from the fact that the founders came from Scotland. He attended this school until 1910, when he began attending the University of Vienna to study physics and chemistry. In 1912, he took courses at the University of Zurich and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH). It was in Zurich he met Otto Stern, who was at the ETH; Herzfeld later credited conversations with Stern for his deeper understanding of thermodynamics. In 1913, he went to study at the University of Göttingen, after which Herzfeld returned to Vienna, and was granted his doctorate in 1914, under Friedrich Hasenöhrl, who had become Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, upon the suicide of Ludwig Boltzmann in 1906.
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