Rudolf Kohlrausch

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Rudolf Hermann Arndt Kohlrausch (November 6, 1809 - March 8, 1858) was a German physicist who was a native of Göttingen, and a professor at the Universities of Marburg and Erlangen. He was the son of educator Heinrich Friedrich Theodor Kohlrausch (1780-1867) and father to physicist Friedrich Kohlrausch (1840-1910).

In 1854 Kohlrausch introduced the relaxation phenomena, and used the stretched exponential function to explain relaxation effects of a Leyden jar. In 1857 with Wilhelm Weber (1804-1891) he demonstrated that the ratio of electrostatic to electromagnetic units produced a speed that matched the value of the then known speed of light. This finding led to Maxwell's conjecture that light is an electromagnetic wave. Also, the first usage of the letter "c" to denote the speed of light was in an 1856 paper by Kohlrausch and Weber.

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