Gregor Wentzel
German physicist (1898–1978)
Gregor Wentzel (17 February 1898 – 12 August 1978) was a German physicist known for development of quantum mechanics. Wentzel, Hendrik Kramers, and Léon Brillouin developed the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation in 1926. In his early years, he contributed to X-ray spectroscopy, but then broadened out to make contributions to quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, superconductivity and meson theory.
Biography
Early life and family
Gregor Wentzel was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, as the first of four children of Joseph and Anna Wentzel. He married Anna Lauretta Wielich and his only child, Donat Wentzel, was born in 1934. The family moved to the United States in 1948 until he and Anny returned to Ascona, Switzerland in 1970.
Education and academia
Wentzel began his university education in mathematics and physics in 1916, at the University of Freiburg. During 1917 and 1918, he served in the armed forces during World War I. He then resumed his education at the University of Freiburg until 1919, when he went to the University of Greifswald. In 1920, he went to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) to study under Arnold Sommerfeld. Wentzel was awarded his doctorate in 1921 and completed his Habilitation in 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gregor Wentzel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.