Gustav Jaumann

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gustav Jaumann was an Austrian physicist. An assistant to the physicist Ernst Mach, he was gifted in mathematics and an opponent of the reality of small particles like electrons and atoms^[1]. He was offered a professorship at Prague University in 1910, but refused the position after finding out that he was the faculty's second choice. The candidate who was the faculty's first choice, Albert Einstein, would accept the offer after it was turned down by Jaumann, who said: "If Einstein has been proposed as the first choice because of the belief that he has greater achievements to his credit, then I will have nothing to do with a university that chases after modernity and does not appreciate merit."^[2] Jaumann was the candidate preferred by the Austro-Hungrarian ministry (Franz Joseph and his ministers had to approve of appointments such as these) because he was Austrian and not Jewish. Einstein, under the impression he would not receive the job blamed his "Semitic origin [that] the ministry did not approve [of]"^[2].