Life
Schwarzschild was born in Frankfurt am Main to Jewish parents. His father was active in the business community of the city, and the family had ancestors in the city dating back to the sixteenth century. Karl attended a Jewish primary school until 11 years of age. He was something of a child prodigy, having two papers on binary orbits (celestial mechanics) published before he was sixteen. He studied at Straßburg and Munich, obtaining his doctorate in 1896 for a work on Jules Henri Poincaré's theories.
From 1897, he worked as assistant at the Kuffner observatory in Vienna.
From 1901 until 1909 he was a professor at the prestigious institute at Göttingen, where he had the opportunity to work with some significant figures including David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. Schwarzschild became the director of the observatory in Göttingen. He married Else Posenbach, the daughter of a professor of surgery at Göttingen, in 1909, and later that year moved to Potsdam, where he took up the post of director of the Astrophysical Observatory. This was then the most prestigious post available for an astronomer in Germany. He and Else had three children, Agathe, Martin (who went on to become a professor of astronomy at Princeton University), and Alfred.
From 1912, Schwarzschild was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he joined the German army despite being over 40 years old. He served on both the western and eastern fronts, rising to the rank of lieutenant in the artillery.
While serving on the front in Russia in 1915, he began to suffer from a rare and painful skin disease called pemphigus. Nevertheless, he managed to write three outstanding papers, two on relativity theory and one on quantum theory. His papers on relativity produced the first exact solutions to the Einstein field equations, and a minor modification of these results gives the well-known solution that now bears his name: the Schwarzschild metric.
Schwarzschild's struggle with pemphigus may have eventually led to his death. He died on May 11, 1916.
Read more about this topic: Karl Schwarzschild
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.”
—Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865)
“Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannnot endure it.... Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)