Paul Peter Ewald

Paul Peter Ewald, FRS (January 23, 1888 in Berlin, Germany – August 22, 1985 in Ithaca, New York) was a German crystallographer and physicist, a pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods.

Ewald received his early education in the classics at the Gymnasium in Berlin and Potsdam, where he learned to speak Greek, French, and English, in addition to his native language of German.

Ewald began his higher education in physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, during the winter of 1905. Then in 1906 and 1907 he continued his formal education at the University of Göttingen, where his interests turned primarily to mathematics. At that time, Göttingen was a world-class center of mathematics under the three “Mandarins” of Göttingen: Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski. While studying at Göttingen, Ewald was taken on by Hilbert as an Ausarbeiter, a paid position as a scribe, i.e., he would take notes in Hilbert’s classes, have the notes approved by Hilbert’s assistant – at that time Ernst Hellinger – and then prepare a clean copy for the Lesezimmer – the mathematics reading room. In 1907, he continued his mathematical studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU), under Arnold Sommerfeld at his Institute for Theoretical Physics. He was granted his doctorate in 1912. His doctoral thesis developed the laws of propagation of X-rays in single crystals. After earning his doctorate, he was an assistant to Sommerfeld.

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