Franz Ernst Neumann (11 September 1798 – 23 May 1895) was a German mineralogist and physicist. He devised the first formulas to calculate inductance. He also formulated Neumann's law for molecular heat. In electromagnetism, he is credited for introducing the magnetic vector potential. In A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism of 1873, James Clerk Maxwell attributes the mathematical formulation of Faraday's law of induction to Neumann.
Contents
Biography
Early life
Franz Ernst Neumann was born in Joachimsthal, Margraviate of Brandenburg (near Berlin), the son of Ernst Neumann, a farmer who became a state agent. His mother was a Countess who was not allowed to marry Ernst, and Neumann did not meet her mother until he was 10 years old.
Neumann attended a Gymnasium in Berlin, where he excelled in mathematics. However his studies were interrupted by the war with France. In 1815 he paused his education at Berlin to serve as a volunteer in the Hundred Days against Napoleon, and was wounded in the Battle of Ligny.
He later returned to finish his studies in Berlin. Subsequently, he enrolled at Berlin University in 1818 as a student of theology, but soon turned to scientific subjects.
Professional career
Neumann's early work was primarily centered around crystallography. His researched gained him recognition, leading to his appointment as Privatdozent at the University of Königsberg. In 1828 he became extraordinary, and in 1829 ordinary, professor of mineralogy and physics. His 1831 study on the specific heats of compounds included what is now known as Neumann's law: the molecular heat of a compound is equal to the sum of the atomic heats of its constituents.
Devoting himself next to optics, he produced memoirs which earned him a high place among early searchers of a true dynamical theory of light. In 1832, by the aid of a particular hypothesis as to the constitution of the ether, he reached by a rigorous dynamical calculation results agreeing with those obtained by Augustin Louis Cauchy, and succeeded in deducing laws of double refraction closely resembling those of Augustin-Jean Fresnel. In studying double refraction, with his deduction of the elastic constants (on which the optical properties depend) Neumann employed the assumption that the symmetry of the elastic behavior of a crystal was equal to that of its form. In other words, he assumed that the magnitudes of the components of a physical property in symmetric positions are equivalent. This assumption substantially reduced the number of independent constants and greatly simplified the elastic equations. However, four decades passed before Neumann elaborated his application of symmetry in a course on elasticity in 1873. This principle was later formalized by his student Woldemar Voigt (1850–1918) in 1885: "the symmetry of the physical phenomenon is at least as high as the crystallographic symmetry", which became a fundamental postulate of crystal physics known as Neumann’s principle. In 1900, Voigt attributed this principle to Neumann's 1832 paper even though, at most, all that was present in that work was an implicit assumption that the symmetry of the phenomenon was equal to that of the crystal. Bernhard Minnigerode (1837–1896), another student of Neumann, first expressed this relation in written form in 1887 in the journal Neues Jahrb. Mineral Geol. Paleontol. (Vol. 5, p. 145).
In 1845, Neumann introduced the magnetic vector potential to discuss Ampère's circuital law. In this work, expanded in 1847, he introduced the first mathematical treatment of Faraday's law of induction.
Later, Neumann attacked the problem of giving mathematical expression to the conditions holding for a surface separating two crystalline media, and worked out from theory the laws of double refraction in strained crystalline bodies. He also made important contributions to the mathematical theory of electrodynamics, and in papers published in 1845 and 1847, established mathematically the laws of the induction of electric currents. His last publication, which appeared in 1878, was on spherical harmonics (Beiträge zur Theorie der Kugelfunctionen).
Children
Neumann had four children with his wife Luise Florentine Hagen (born 1800): Carl Gottfried Neumann (1832–1925), Franz Ernst Christian Neumann (1834–1918), Friedrich Julius Neumann (1835-1910), and Luise Neumann (1837-1934). His son Carl, became a mathematician and physicist; his younger son, Ernst became professor of medicine in Königsberg.
Works
Beiträge zur Krystallonomie (Mittler, Berlin, 1823)
Beiträge zur Theorie der Kugelfunctionen (B. G. Teubner, Leipzig, 1878)
Vorlesungen über die Theorie des Magnetismus (in German). Leipzig: Benedictus Gotthelf Teubner. 1881.
Einleitung in die theoretische Physik (in German). Leipzig: Benedictus Gotthelf Teubner. 1883.
Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Elasticität der festen Körper und des Lichtäthers (in German). Leipzig: Benedictus Gotthelf Teubner. 1885.
Vorlesungen über theoretische Optik (in German). Leipzig: Benedictus Gotthelf Teubner. 1885.
Franz Neumanns Gesammelte werke (2 vols.) (B. C. Teubner, Leipzig, 1906–1928)