Arnold johannes wilhelm sommerfeld biography template full

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Arnold wrote autobiographical notes in around which he updated towards the end of his life and we give some quotations from these throughout this biography. In particular let us quote what Arnold said about his parents see for example [ 1 ] , or Sommerfeld's Collected Works which contains the full autobiographical article :- My father, the practicing physician, To my energetic and intellectually vigorous mother I owe an infinite debt.

Two slightly older pupils at the same school were Minkowski and Wien. At this High School, he excelled in all his subjects and it was not clear to him what subjects he should pursue further:- I was almost more interested in literature and history than in the exact sciences; I was equally good in all subjects including the classical languages.

He took his final school examinations the Abitur in and decided that he would concentrate on mathematics at University. Hilbert , Hurwitz and Lindemann all lectured to Sommerfeld and, after attending a course by Hilbert on the theory of ideal numbers, he felt that abstract pure mathematics was the right subject for him. However Sommerfeld's interests were in mathematics rather than physics.

He was also much involved in student life and he joined the Burschenschaft, a student society, which proved a major distraction [ 1 ] :- Active participation in [ the Burschenschaft ] , with its compulsory drinking bouts and fencing duels, prevented systematic and concentrated study in his first few years at university. In fact he received a long fencing scar on his forehead from this time.

It was a thesis which, during the summer of I conceived and wrote out in a few weeks. In this thesis he studied the representation of arbitrary functions by the eigenfunctions of partial differential equations and other given sets of functions. After passing his teaching diploma examinations in , he then began a year of military service.

Many academics find military service a necessary evil to be suffered but not so Sommerfeld.