Ernst Ising

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Ernst Ising (born May 10, 1900, Cologne, Germany – May 11, 1998, Peoria, Illinois, USA) was a German physicist, who is best remembered for the development of the Ising model of ferromagnetism. He was a professor of physics at Bradley University until his retirement in 1976.

Ising earned a Ph.D in physics from the University of Hamburg in 1924. His doctoral thesis studied a problem suggested by his teacher, Wilhelm Lenz. He investigated the special case of a linear chain of magnetic moments, which are only able to take two positions, "up" and "down," and which are coupled by interactions between nearest neighbors, a model which came to be known as the famous Ising model.

As a young German-Jewish scientist, Ising was barred from teaching when Hitler came to power. He worked menial jobs and, though he survived World War II and taught afterwards in the United States, never published again.^[1]