Hans Ferdinand Mayer

Hans Ferdinand Mayer (* 23 October 1895 in Pforzheim; † 18 October 1980 in Munich) was a German mathematician and physicist perhaps most notable for the Oslo Report which revealed German technological secrets near the start of World War II.

Biography

Hans Ferdinand Mayer studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at the universities of Karlsruhe and Heidelberg. In 1920 he attained a doctorate "on the behaviour of molecules in relation to free slow electrons". His professor was the Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard. In 1922 he joined the Berlin laboratory of Siemens & Halske AG. From 1926 he co-operated with Karl Küpfmüller. Both scientists concerned themselves with possibilities of interference-free information transfer of long haul circuits. In 1936 Mayer took control of the research department. In 1943 he was interned in concentration camps until the end of the war, although the Nazis never knew of the Oslo Report. After the Second World War Mayer stayed for some years in the USA. There he taught among other places at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as a Professor for communications technology. In 1950 he came back to Germany. He was head of the Siemens & Halske research department for communications technology in Munich until 1962.

Works

Hans Ferdinand Mayer was the author of the Oslo Report and signed it as "a German scientist, who is on your side". Only in 1977 did he tell his own family that he had written the Oslo report. His will was written so that the report would only be published after his death and that of his wife.

In November 1926 Mayer published an article (H.F.Mayer. "On the equivalent-circuit scheme of the amplifier tube". Telegraph and telephony, 15:335 - 337, 1926.) which describes the transformation of spare voltage supplies after equivalent current sources. It is an extension of Thévenin's theorem stating that any collection of voltage sources and resistors with two terminals is electrically equivalent to an ideal current source. Edward Lawry Norton likewise described this in 1926 in an internal report for Bell lab. The theorem is well-known under the name Norton's theorem or Mayer-Norton theorem. Hans Ferdinand Mayer published some 25 technical articles and held more than 80 patents.

Honours

*Honorary doctorate at the technical university of Stuttgart (1956)
*Gauss-Weber-Medaille at the University of Goettingen
*Philipp Reis Preis der Deutschen Post in 1961
*Ehrenring des VDE's in 1968.

Sources

*Don H. Johnson: " Scanning Our Past - Origins OF the Equivalent Circuit Concept: The Current SOURCE Equivalent ", 2002 [http://cmc.rice.edu/docs/docs/Joh2002Sep1TheEquival.pdf PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOLUME. 91, NO. 5, MAY 2003]
* http://www.dgpt.org/DE/service/biografien/Hans_Ferdinand_Mayer.php

Persondata
NAME=Mayer, Hans Ferdinand
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION= physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH= 23 October 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH= Pforzheim
DATE OF DEATH= 18 October 1980
PLACE OF DEATH= Munich