Svein Rosseland

Svein Rosseland (March 31, 1894, Kvam, Hardanger – January 19, 1985, Bærum) was a Norwegian astrophysicist and a pioneer in the field of theoretical astrophysics.

Svein Rosseland was born in Kvam, in Hardanger, Norway. Rosseland grew up the youngest of nine siblings. He went to his final exams in Haugesund in 1917 and then went to the University of Oslo. After only three semesters at the University he left in 1919 to work as an assistant professor with the meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes at the Bergen School of Meteorology. In 1920 he went to the Institute of Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen, where he met Niels Bohr and other prominent physicists, and where he wrote two seminal papers. He spent 1924–1926 as a Rockefeller Fellow at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California.

In 1927, Rosseland earned a PhD. from the University of Oslo. As a professor at the University of Oslo from 1928 to 1964, he built up and headed academics at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (Institutt for Teoretisk Astrofysikk). Rosseland was a key participant when the University of Oslo built the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in 1934, using funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 1929-30 he was a guest professor at the Harvard College Observatory. In 1934 he founded the journal Astrophysics Norvegica, published by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 1936 he published his textbook Theoretical Astrophysics, which contained numerous original contributions. Rosseland was instrumental in the effort behind the building of the Oslo Analyzer, finished in 1938 and for four years the world's most powerful differential analyzer.

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