Prof. Gustav Jäger

Abstract

IN Gustav Jäger, whose death at seventy-three years of age occurred on January 21, Vienna has lost one of the last men who linked present-day physics with the classical period of the Viennese school as represented by the names of Stefan, Loschmidt and Boltzmann, and moreover one who had an unusually wide and all-round knowledge of physics. After several years of study in the laboratories of Stefan in Vienna and Helmholtz and Kundt in Berlin, he became assistant first to Stefan and later to Boltzmann. In 1905, he was appointed professor at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, and then was called in 1918 to fill the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, which had formerly been held successively by Stefan, Boltzmann and Hasenohrl. In 1920, Jäger changed this chair for the directorship of one of the University institutes of experimental physics. Generations of students have listened to his lecture courses, and greater still is the number of those who were introduced to the elements of mathematical physics through his “Theoretische Physik”, published in the handy volumes of the “Sammlung Gosehen”, and distinguished by clarity as well as conciseness.