Paul Sophus Epstein

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This article is about Paul Sophus Epstein. For other persons called Paul Epstein, see Paul Epstein (disambiguation).

Paul Sophus Epstein (Warsaw, then part of Imperial Russia, now Poland, March 20, 1883–Pasadena, February 8, 1966) was a Russian- American mathematician/physicist. He was known for his contributions to the development of quantum mechanics.

Paul Epstein's parents, Siegmund Simon Epstein and Sarah Sophia Epstein were of a middle class Jewish family. He went to the Hochschule in Minsk, and from 1901-1905 studied mathematics and physics at the Imperial University of Moscow under Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev. In 1909 he graduated, and became a Privatdozent at the University of Moscow. In 1910 he went to Munich, Germany, to do research under Arnold Sommerfeld, who was his advisor, and Epstein was granted a Ph.D.[1] from the Technische Universität München, in 1914.[2] At the outbreak of World War I he was in Munich, and considered an "enemy alien". Thanks to Sommerfeld's intervention he was allowed to stay in Munich as a private citizen, and could continue with his research. By that time Epstein became interested in the quantum theory of atomic structure. After the war he went to Leiden, to become Hendrik Lorentz' and Paul Ehrenfest's assistant. In 1921 he was recruited by Robert Millikan to come to the California Institute of Technology, where he remained for the rest of his career.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Dissertation title: Diffraction from a Plane Screen. P. S. Epstein Beugung an einem ebenen Schirm Dissertation, Munich, 1914. As cited in: Eckart Paper – Carl Eckart The Solution of the Problem of the Simple Oscillator by a Combination of the Schrödinger and the Lanczos Theories, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 12 473-476 (1926). California Institute of Technology. Communicated May 31, 1926.
  2. ^ P. S. Epstein - Mathematics Genealogy Project.

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