Wilhelm Anderson

Wilhelm Robert Karl Anderson (29 October 1880, Minsk, Belarus - 26 March 1940, Międzyrzecz) was an Estonian astrophysicist who studied the physical structure of the stars.

Life

Wilhelm Anderson was born in Minsk into an ethnic German Family. His younger brothers were the well known mathematician Oskar Anderson and the folklorist Walter Anderson. Anderson spentsome of his youth in Kazan, where his father Nikolai Anderson was a university professor.

Between 1910 and 1920, he worked as a physics teacher in Samara and Minsk. Together with his brother Walter Anderson, he moved to Tartu (Estonia) in 1920. At the University of Tartu, he first gained a Masters degree in 1923 and then a Doctorate in 1927. Early in 1940, he was resettled to Germany, where he died in a Sanatorium in Międzyrzecz, shortly thereafter.

Anderson is probably best known for his work on the mass limit for white dwarf stars (1929, Tartu), which has since become known as the Chandrasekhar Limit.

Work (selection)

* "Über die Existenzmöglichkeit von kosmischem Staube in der Sonnenkorona." Zeitschrift für Physik 28, Berlin, 1924.
* "Über die Grenzdichte der Materie und der Energie." Zeitschrift für Physik 56, Berlin, 1929.

See also

*Chandrasekhar limit

References

*et icon http://www.aai.ee/muuseum/Reprints/HTML/index.html?tartuastrofueuesikwilhelman.htm
*"Giants of physics found white-dwarf mass limits" in NATURE|Vol 440|9 March 2006, Page 148