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Rudolf Peierls
Sign in to saveAlso known as Rudolf Ernst Peierls, R.E. Peierls, Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, Sir Rudolph Ernst Peierls
German-born British physicist
OverviewAI-generated
Rudolf Ernst Peierls was a German-British theoretical physicist and university teacher. Born in Berlin on 1907-06-05, he worked at the University of Oxford, University of Birmingham, Leiden University, and Victoria University of Manchester. He participated in the Manhattan Project and spoke English and German. He died in Oxford on 1995-09-19.
Peierls was educated at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Leipzig University. His doctoral advisors included Werner Heisenberg, Friedrich Hund, and Peter Debye. He supervised doctoral students such as Gerald E. Brown, Fred Hoyle, John Stewart Bell, James S. Langer, and Klaus Fuchs.
He was a member of the Royal Society, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, French Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Copley Medal, Royal Medal, Max Planck Medal, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He held citizenship in the United Kingdom and Germany.
Synthesized by Vinony from 30 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, TMDb, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Film & TV
Berlin, Germany
Sir Rudolf Peierls was a German-British physicist.
Known for
- Väter der tausend Sonnen — Self - Interviewee1990
via TMDB
Key facts
- Born
- Rudolf Ernst Peierls , 5 June 1907, Berlin , Kingdom of Prussia in the German Empire
- Died
- 19 September 1995 (1995-09-19) (aged 88), Oxford , Oxfordshire , England
- Citizenship
- German (1907–1940), British (1940–1995)
- Alma mater
- Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin , Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München , Leipzig University , University of Manchester , St John's College, Cambridge
- Awards
- Commander of the Order, of the British Empire (1946), Medal of Freedom (1946), Royal Medal (1959), Lorentz Medal (1962), Max Planck Medal (1963), Knight Bachelor (1968), Enrico Fermi Award (1980), Matteucci Medal (1982), Copley Medal (1986)
- Fields
- Physicist
- Institutions
- University of Manchester , University of Cambridge , University of Birmingham , New College, Oxford , University of Washington , Manhattan Project
- Thesis
- Zur kinetischen Theorie der Wärmeleitung in Kristallen (1929)
- Doctoral advisor
- Werner Heisenberg
- Other academic advisors
- Wolfgang Pauli
- Doctoral students
- Fred Hoyle , E. E. Salpeter , Gerald E. Brown , Stuart T. Butler , Walter Marshall , James S. Langer , John Stewart Bell , Stanley Mandelstam , Gastón García-Calderón
- Other notable students
- N. M. Butt , M. A. Beg
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Ernst
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- Germany
- Place of birth
- Berlin
- Place of death
- Oxford
- Occupation
- nuclear physicist
- Educated at
- Leipzig University
- Employer
- University of Cambridge
- Languages spoken
- German
- Award
- Medal of Freedom
- Participant in
- Manhattan Project
- Doctoral advisor
- Peter Debye
- Doctoral student
- Edwin Ernest Salpeter
- Field of work
- theoretical physics
- Image
- Peierls,Rudolf 1966 Göttingen.jpg
- Work location
- Oxford
- Residence
- United Kingdom
Show 8 more facts
- Commons category
- Rudolf Peierls
- member of
- Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
- date of birth
- 1907-06-05
- date of death
- 1995-09-19
- student
- Klaus Fuchs
- name in native language
- Rudolf Ernst Peierls
- P8168
- Phillips
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
via Wikidata · CC0
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Encyclopedic overview
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, CBE FRS (/ˈpaɪ.ərlz/; German: [ˈpaɪɐls]; 5 June 1907 – 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".
Peierls studied physics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München under Arnold Sommerfeld, Leipzig University under Werner Heisenberg, and ETH Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli. After receiving his DPhil from Leipzig University in 1929, he became an assistant to Pauli at ETH Zurich. In 1932, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which he used to study in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge under Ralph H. Fowler. Because of his Jewish background, he elected to not return home after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, but to remain in Britain, where he worked with Hans Bethe at the Victoria University of Manchester, then at the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge. In 1937, Mark Oliphant, the newly appointed Australian professor of physics at the University of Birmingham recruited him for a new chair there in applied mathematics.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Rudolf Peierls” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.