Rolf Hagedorn

Rolf Hagedorn
Rolf Hagedorn, 1981
Born	20 July 1919
Died	9 March 2003 (2003-03-10) (aged 83)
Nationality	German
Fields	High-energy physics
Alma mater	University of Göttingen Max Planck Institute for Physics
Known for	Hagedorn temperature

Rolf Hagedorn (20 July 1919 – 9 March 2003) was a German theoretical physicist who worked at CERN. He is known for the idea that hadronic matter has a "melting point". The Hagedorn temperature is named in his honor.

Hagedorn's younger life was deeply marked by the upheavals of World War II in Europe. He graduated from high school in 1937 and was drafted into the German Army. After the war began, he was shipped off into North Africa as an officer in the Rommel Afrika Korps. He was captured in 1943, and spent the rest of the war in an officer prison camp in the United States. Most of the prisoners were young and with nothing to do, Hagedorn and others set up their own 'university' where they taught each other whatever they knew. There, Hagedorn ran into an assistant of David Hilbert, who taught him mathematics.

When Hagedorn came back home in January 1946, most German universities were destroyed. Because of his training in the Crossville, Tennessee prison camp, he was accepted as a fourth-semester student at the University of Göttingen – one of the few remaining universities.

After having completed his studies with the usual diploma (1950) and doctorate (1952), with a thesis under R. Becker on thermal solid-state theory, he was accepted as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPI), still at Göttingen at the time. The MPI director was Werner Heisenberg. While he was there, he was among a group of physicists including Bruno Zumino, Harry Lehmann, Wolfhart Zimmermann, Kurt Symanzik, Gerhard Lüders, Reinhard Oehme, Vladimir Glaser, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.