Beno Gutenberg

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Beno Gutenberg
Beno Gutenberg
Born	June 4, 1889 Darmstadt
Died	January 25, 1960
Nationality	Germany
Fields	seismology
Institutions	California Institute of Technology
Alma mater	University of Göttingen
Doctoral advisor	Emil Wiechert

Beno Gutenberg (June 4, 1889 – January 25, 1960) was a German-born seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude.

Gutenberg was born in Darmstadt, Germany and obtained his Doctorate in Physics from University of Göttingen in 1911. His advisor was Emil Wiechert. Gutenberg held positions at the University of Strasbourg which he lost when Strasbourg became French in 1918. After some years where he had to sustain himself with managing his father's soap factory, he obtained in 1926 a junior professorship at University of Frankfurt-am-Main, which was badly paid. Although he was already in the Twenties one of the leading seismologists worldwide, and definitely the leading seismologist in Germany, he was then still dependent on the position in his father's factory. In 1928 the attempt to become the successor of his academic teacher Emil Wiechert in Göttingen failed. There are hints that Gutenbergs Jewish background might have played a role, because already in the Twenties there were strong antisemitic tendencies in German universities (see the article by Leon Knopoff linked below). For similar reasons he was also not accepted for a professorship in Potsdam to become the successor of Gustav Angenheister.

Since Gutenberg did not have any chance to sustain himself solely from his scientific work in Germany, he accepted a position as Professor of Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena in 1930. Had he obtained a full professorship in Germany, he would have lost it in 1933 anyway, like so many other scientists of jewish ancestry, many of whom emigrated to the United States. Gutenberg, especially in his collaboration with Charles Francis Richter, made CalTech the leading seismological institute worldwide.

Collaborating with Richter, Gutenberg developed a relationship between seismic magnitude and energy, represented in the equation

$\!\ \log E(s) = 11.8 + 1.5 M$ .

This gives the energy $E (s)$ given from earthquakes from seismic waves in ergs. Another famous result known as Gutenberg-Richter law provides probability distribution of earthquakes for given energy.

He also worked on determining the depth of the core-mantle boundary as well as other properties of the interior of the earth.