Gustav Kirchhoff

Robert

Born: 12-Mar-1824 Birthplace: Knigsberg, Prussia, Germany Died: 17-Oct-1887 Location of death: Berlin, Germany Cause of death: unspecified Gender: Male RaceorEthnicity: White Occupation: Physicist
Nationality: Germany

Executive summary: Theory of spectrum

analysis

German physicist, born at Knigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) on the 12th of March 1824, and was educated at the university of his native town, where he graduated PhD in 1847. After acting as privat-docent at Berlin for some time, he became extraordinary professor of physics at Breslau in 1850. Four years later he was appointed professor of physics at Heidelberg, and in 1875 he was transferred to Berlin, where he died on the 17th of October 1887. Kirchhoff's contributions to mathematical physics were numerous and important, his strength lying in his powers of stating a new physical problem in terms of mathematics, not merely in working out the solution after it had been so formulated. A number of his papers were concerned with electrical questions. One of the earliest was devoted to electrical conduction in a thin plate, and especially in a circular one, and it also contained a theorem which enables the distribution of currents in a network of conductors to be ascertained. Another discussed conduction in curved sheets; a third, the distribution of electricity in two influencing spheres; a fourth, the determination of the constant on which depends the intensity of induced currents; while others were devoted to Ohm's law, the motion of electricity in submarine cables, induced magnetism, etc. In other papers, again, various miscellaneous topics were treated -- the thermal conductivity of iron, crystalline reflection and refraction, certain propositions in the thermodynamics of solution and vaporization, etc. An important part of his work was contained in his Vorlesungen ber mathematische Physik (1876), in which the principles of dynamics, as well as various special problems, were treated in a somewhat novel and original manner. But his name is best known for the researches, experimental and mathematical, in radiation which led him, in company with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, to the development of spectrum analysis as a complete system in 1859-60. He can scarcely be called its inventor, for not only had many investigators already used the prism as an instrument of chemical inquiry, but considerable

progress had been made towards the explanation of the principles upon which spectrum analysis rests. But to him belongs the merit of having, most probably without knowing what had already been done, enunciated a complete account of its theory, and of thus having firmly established it as a means by which the chemical constituents of celestial bodies can be discovered through the comparison of their spectra with those of the various elements that exist on this earth.

James Clerk Maxwell

Born: 13-Jun-1831 Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland Died: 5-Nov-1879 Location of death: Cambridge, England Cause of death: Cancer - unspecified Remains: Buried, Parton Chuchyard, Glenlair, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland Gender: Male Religion: Christian Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Physicist Nationality: Scotland Executive summary: Maxwell's equations British physicist, the last representative of a younger branch of the well-known Scottish family of Clerk of Penicuik, and was born at Edinburgh on the 13th of November 1831. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy (1840-47) and the University of Edinburgh (1847-50). Entering at Cambridge in 1850, he spent a term or two at Peter house, but afterwards migrated to Trinity. In 1854 he took his degree as second wrangler, and was declared equal with the senior wrangler of his year (E. J. Routh) in the higher ordeal of the Smith's prize examination. He held the chair of Natural Philosophy in Marischal College, Aberdeen, from 1856 until the fusion of the two colleges there in 1860. For eight years subsequently he held the chair of Physics and Astronomy in King's College, London, but resigned in 1868 and retired to his estate of Glenlair in Kirkcudbrightshire. He was summoned from his seclusion in 1871 to become the first holder of the newly founded professorship of Experimental Physics in Cambridge; and it was under his direction that the plans of the Cavendish Laboratory were prepared. He superintended every step of the progress of the building and of the purchase of the very valuable collection of apparatus with which it was equipped at the expense of its munificent founder seventh Duke of Devonshire (Chancellor of the University, and one of its most distinguished alumni). He died at Cambridge on the 5th of November 1879. For more than half of his brief life he held a prominent position in the very foremost rank of natural philosophers. His contributions to scientific societies began in his fifteenth year, when Professor J. D. Forbes communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh a short paper of his on a mechanical method of tracing Cartesian ovals. In his eighteenth year, while still a

student in Edinburgh, he contributed two valuable papers to the Transactions of the same society -- one of which, "On the Equilibrium of Elastic Solids", is remarkable, not only on account of its intrinsic power and the youth of its author, but also because in it he laid the foundation of one of the most singular discoveries of his later life, the temporary double refraction produced in viscous liquids by shearing stress. Immediately after taking his degree, he read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society a very novel paper, "On the Transformation of Surfaces by Bending." This is one of the few purely mathematical papers he published, and it exhibited at once to experts the full genius of its author. About the same time appeared his elaborate paper, "On Faraday's Lines of Force", in which he gave the first indication of some of those extraordinary electrical investigations which culminated in the greatest work of his life. He obtained in 1859 the Adams prize in Cambridge for a very original and powerful essay, "On the Stability of Saturn's Rings." From 1855 to 1872 he published at intervals a series of valuable investigations connected with the "Perception of Color" and "Color-Blindness", for the earlier of which he received the Rumford medal from the Royal Society in 1860. The instruments which he devised for these investigations were simple and convenient, but could not have been thought of for the purpose except by a man whose knowledge was co-extensive with his ingenuity. One of his greatest investigations bore on the "Kinetic Theory of Gases." Originating with D. Bernoulli, this theory was advanced by the successive labors of John Herapath, James Prescott Joule, and particularly R. Clausius, to such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt; but it received enormous developments from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician. He wrote an admirable textbook of theTheory of Heat (1871), and a very excellent elementary treatise on Matter and Motion (1876). But the great work of his life was devoted to electricity. He began by reading, with the most profound admiration and attention, the whole of Michael Faradays extraordinary selfrevelations, and proceeded to translate the ideas of that master into the succinct and expressive notation of the mathematicians. A considerable part of this translation was accomplished during his career as an undergraduate in Cambridge. The writer had the opportunity of perusing the manuscript of "On Faraday's Lines of Force", in a form little different from the final one, a year before Maxwell took his degree. His great object, as it was also the great object of Faraday, was to overturn the idea of action at a distance. The splendid researches of S. D. Poisson and Carl Friedrich Gauss had shown how to reduce all the phenomena of statical electricity to mere attractions and repulsions exerted at a distance by particles of an imponderable on one another. Lord Kelvin had, in 1846, shown that a totally different assumption, based upon other analogies, led (by its own special mathematical methods) to precisely the same results. He treated the resultant electric force at any point as analogous to the flux of heat from sources distributed in the same manner as the supposed, electric particles. This paper of Thomson's, whose ideas Maxwell afterwards developed in an extraordinary manner, seems to have given the first hint that there are at least two perfectly distinct methods of arriving at the known formulae of statical electricity. The step to magnetic phenomena was comparatively simple; but it was otherwise as regards electromagnetic phenomena, where current electricity is essentially involved. An

exceedingly ingenious, but highly artificial, theory had been devised by W. E. Weber, which was found capable of explaining all the phenomena investigated by Andr-Marie Ampre as well as the induction currents of Faraday. But this was based upon the assumption of a distance-action between electric particles, the intensity of which depended on their relative motion as well as on their position. This was, of course, even more repugnant to Maxwell's mind than the statical distance-action developed by Poisson. The first paper of Maxwell's in which an attempt at an admissible physical theory of electromagnetism was made was communicated to the Royal Society in 1867. But the theory, in a fully developed form, first appeared in 1873 in his great treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. This work was one of the most splendid monuments ever raised by the genius of a single individual. Availing himself of the admirable generalized co-ordinate system ofJoseph-Louis Lagrange, Maxwell showed how to reduce all electric and magnetic phenomena to stresses and motions of a material medium, and, as one preliminary, but excessively severe, test of the truth of his theory, he pointed out that (if the electromagnetic medium be that which is required for the explanation of the phenomena of light) the velocity of light in a vacuum should be numerically the same as the ratio of the electromagnetic and electrostatic units. In fact, the means of the best determinations of each of these quantities separately agree with one another more closely than do the various values of either. One of Maxwell's last great contributions to science was the editing (with copious original notes) of the Electrical Researches of the Hon. Henry Cavendish, from which it appeared that Henry Cavendish, already famous by many other researches (such as the mean density of the earth, the composition of water, etc.), must be looked on as, in his day, a man of Maxwell's own stamp as a theorist and an experimenter of the very first rank. In private life Clerk Maxwell was one of the most lovable of men, a sincere and unostentatious Christian. Though perfectly free from any trace of envy or ill-will, he yet showed on fit occasion his contempt for that pseudoscience which seeks for the applause of the ignorant by professing to reduce the whole system of the universe to a fortuitous sequence of uncaused events. His collected works, including the series of articles on the properties of matter, such as "Atom", "Attraction", "Capillary Action", "Diffusion", "Ether", etc., which he contributed to the 9th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, were issued in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1890; and an extended biography, by his former schoolfellow and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882. Father: John Clerk (lawyer) Wife: Katherine Mary Dewar (m. 1858, no children)

Thevenin's Theorem :
. . This theorem was first discovered by German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1853, but was then rediscovered in 1883 by French telegraph engineer Lon Charles Thvenin (1857-1926

Hermann von Helmholtz

AKA Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz Born: 31-Aug-1821 Birthplace: Potsdam,Germany Died: 8-Sep-1894 Location of death: Charlottenburg, Berlin,Germany Cause of death: unspecified Gender: Male RaceorEthnicity: White Sexualorientation: Straight Occupation: Physicist Nationality: Germany Executive summary: Law of Conservation of Energy German philosopher and man of science, born on the 31st of August 1821 at Potsdam, near Berlin. His father, Ferdinand, was a teacher of philology and philosophy in the gymnasium, while his mother was a Hanoverian lady, a lineal descendant of the great Quaker William Penn. Delicate in early life, Helmholtz became by habit a student, and his father at the same time directed his thoughts to natural phenomena. He soon showed mathematical powers, but these were not fostered by the careful training mathematicians usually receive, and it may be said that in after years his attention was directed to the higher mathematics mainly by force of circumstances. As his parents were poor, and could not afford to allow him to follow a purely scientific career, he became a surgeon of the Prussian army. In 1842 he wrote a thesis in which he announced the discovery of nerve-cells in ganglia. This was his first work, and from 1842 to 1894, the year of his death, scarcely a year passed without several important, and in some cases epoch-making, papers on scientific subjects coming from his pen. He lived in Berlin

from 1842 to 1849, when he became professor of physiology in Knigsberg. There he remained from 1849 to 1855, when he removed to the chair of physiology in Bonn. In 1858 he became professor of physiology in Heidelberg, and in 1871 he was called to occupy the chair of physics in Berlin. To this professorship was added in 1887 the post of director of the physico-technical institute at Charlottenburg, near Berlin, and he held the two positions together until his death on the 8th of September 1894. His investigations occupied almost the whole field of science, including physiology, physiological optics, physiological acoustics, chemistry, mathematics, electricity and magnetism, meteorology and theoretical mechanics. At an early age he contributed to our knowledge of the causes of putrefaction and fermentation. In physiological science he investigated quantitatively the phenomena of animal heat, and he was one of the earliest in the field of animal electricity. He studied the nature of muscular contraction, causing a muscle to record its movements on a smoked glass plate, and he worked out the problem of the velocity of the nervous impulse both in the motor nerves of the frog and in the sensory nerves of man. In 1847 Helmholtz read to the Physical Society of Berlin a famous paper, ber die Erhaltung der Kraft (on the conservation of force), which became one of the epoch-making papers of the century; indeed, along with Julius Robert Mayer, James Prescott Joule and Lord Kelvin, he may be regarded as one of the founders of the now universally received law of the conservation of energy. The year 1851, while he was lecturing on physiology at Knigsberg, saw the brilliant invention of the ophthalmoscope, an instrument which has been of inestimable value to medicine. It arose from an attempt to demonstrate to his class the nature of the glow of reflected light sometimes seen in the eyes of animals such as the cat. When the great ophthalmologist, A. von Grfe, first saw the fundus of the living human eye, with its optic disc and blood-vessels, his face flushed with excitement, and he cried, "Helmholtz has unfolded to us a new world!" Helmholtz's contributions to physiological optics are of great importance. He investigated the optical constants of the eye, measured by his invention, the ophthalmometer, the radii of curvature of the crystalline lens for near and far vision, explained the mechanism of accommodation by which the eye can focus within certain limits, discussed the phenomena of color vision, and gave a luminous account of the movements of the eyeballs so as to secure single vision with two eyes. In particular he revived and gave new force to the theory of color vision associated with the name of Thomas Young, showing the three primary colors to be red, green and violet, and he applied the theory to the explanation of color blindness. His great work on Physiological Optics (1856-66) is by far the most important book that has appeared on the physiology and physics of vision. Equally distinguished were his labors in physiological acoustics. He explained accurately the mechanism of the bones of the ear, and he discussed the physiological action of the cochlea on the principles of sympathetic vibration. Perhaps his greatest contribution, however, was his attempt to account for our perception of quality of tone. He showed, both by analysis

and by synthesis, that quality depends on the order, number and intensity of the overtones or harmonics that may, and usually do, enter into the structure of a musical tone. He also developed the theory of differential and of summational tones. His work on Sensations of Tone (1862) may well be termed theprincipia of physiological acoustics. He may also be said to be the founder of the fixed-pitch theory of vowel tones, according to which it is asserted that the pitch of a vowel depends on the resonance of the mouth, according to the form of the cavity while singing it, and this independently of the pitch of the note on which the vowel is sung. For the later years of his life his labors may be summed up under the following heads: (1) on the conservation of energy; (2) on hydrodynamics; (3) on electrodynamics and theories of electricity; (4) on meteorological physics; (5) on optics; and (6) on the abstract principles of dynamics. In all these fields of labor he made important contributions to science, and showed himself to be equally great as a mathematician and a physicist. He studied the phenomena of electrical oscillations from 1869 to 1871, and in the latter year he announced that the velocity of the propagation of electromagnetic induction was about 314,000 meters per second. Michael Faraday had shown that the passage of electrical action involved time, and he also asserted that electrical phenomena are brought about by changes in intervening non-conductors or dielectric substances. This led James Clerk Maxwell to frame his theory of electrodynamics, in which electrical impulses were assumed to be transmitted through the ether by waves. G. F. Fitzgerald was the first to attempt to measure the length of electric waves; Helmholtz put the problem into the hands of his favorite pupil, Heinrich Hertz, and the latter finally gave an experimental demonstration of electromagnetic waves, the "Hertzian waves", on which wireless telegraphy depends, and the velocity of which is the same as that of light. The last investigations of Helmholtz related to problems in theoretical mechanics, more especially as to the relations of matter to the ether, and as to the distribution of energy in mechanical systems. In particular he explained the principle of least action, first advanced by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, and developed by Sir W. R. Hamilton, of quaternion fame. Helmholtz also wrote on philosophical and aesthetic problems. His position was that of an empiricist, denying the doctrine of innate ideas and holding that all knowledge is founded on experience, hereditarily transmitted or acquired. The life of Helmholtz was uneventful in the usual sense. He was twice married,, first, in 1849, to Olga von Velten (by whom he had two children, a son and daughter), and secondly, in 1861, to Anna von Mohl, of a Wrtemberg family of high social position. Two children were born of this marriage, a son, Robert, who died in 1889, after showing in experimental physics indications of his father's genius, and a daughter, who married a son of Werner von Siemens. Helmholtz was a man of simple but refined tastes, of noble carriage and somewhat austere manner. His life from first to last was one of devotion to science, and he must be accounted, on intellectual grounds, one of the foremost men of the 19th century.

Father: August Ferdinand Julius Helmholtz (headmaster, Potsdam Gymnasium, d. 1858) Mother: Caroline Penn Wife: Olga von Velten (m. 26-Aug-1849, d. 1859, two children) Wife: Anna von Mohl (m. 16-May-1861)

Lon Charles Thvenin

(30 March 1857, Meaux, Seine-et-Marne - 21 September 1926, Paris) was a French telegraph engineer who extended Ohm's law to the analysis of complex electrical circuits. Born in Meaux, France, Thvenin graduated from the cole Polytechnique in Paris in 1876. In 1878, he joined the corps of telegraph Engineers (which subsequently became the French PTT). There, he initially worked on the development of long distance underground telegraph lines. Appointed as a teaching inspector at the cole Suprieure de Tlgraphie in 1882, he became increasingly interested in the problems of measurement in electrical circuits. As a result of studyingKirchhoff's circuit laws and Ohm's law, he developed his famous theorem, Thvenin's theorem,[1] which made it possible to calculate currents in more complex electrical circuits and allowing people to reduce complex circuits into simpler circuits called Thvenin's equivalent circuits. Also, after becoming head of the Bureau des Lignes, he found time for teaching other subjects outside the cole Suprieure, including a course in mechanics at the Institut National Agronomique, Paris. In 1896, he was appointed Director of the Telegraph Engineering School, and then in 1901, Engineer in chief of the telegraph workshops. He died in Paris. He was a talented violin player. Another favorite pastime of his was angling. He remained single but shared his home with a widowed cousin of his mother's and her two children whom he later adopted. Thvenin consulted several scholars well known at that time, and controversy arose as to whether his law was consistent with the facts or not. Shortly before his death he was visited by a friend of his, J. B. Pomey, and was surprised to hear that his theorem had been accepted all over the world. In 1926, he was taken to Paris for treatment. He left a formal request that no one should accompany him to the cemetery except his family and that nothing be placed on his coffin but a rose from his garden. This is how he was buried at Meaux. Thvenin is remembered as a model engineer and employee, hardworking, of scrupulous morality, strict in his principles but kind at heart.

Edward Lawry Norton

Born: 28-July-1821 Birthplace:Rockland, Maine Died: 28-january -1894 Location of death: Chatham, New Jersey Cause of death: unspecified Gender: Male RaceorEthnicity: White Sexualorientation: Straight Occupation: Physicist Nationality: New york Executive summary: Law of Conservation of Energy Norton's theorem is an extension of Thevenin's theorem and was introduced in 1926 separately by two people: HauseSiemens researcher Hans Ferdinand Mayer (1895-1980) and Bell Labs engineer Edward Lawry Norton (1898-1983). Mayer was the only one of the two who actually published on this topic, but Norton made known his finding through an internal technical report at Bell Labs. . . This theorem states that any linear bilateral circuit with combination of voltage sources , current sources and resistors with two terminals is electrically equivalent to an ideal current soure, INo, in parallel with a single resistor, RNo.This equivalent is called Norton Equivalent. Edward Lawry Norton was born in Rockland, Maine on July 28, 1898. He served as a radio operator in the U.S Navy between 1917 and 1919. He attended the University of Maine for one year before and for one year after his wartime service, then transferred to M.I.T. in 1920, receiving his S.B. degree (electrical engineering) in 1922. He started work in 1922 at the Western Electric Corporation in New York City, which eventually became Bell Laboratories in 1925. While working for Western Electric, he earned a M.A. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1925. He retired in 1961 and died on January 28, 1983 at the King James Nursing Home in Chatham, New Jersey. Norton was something of a legendary figure in network theory work who turned out a prodigious number of designs armed only with a slide rule and his intuition. Many anecdotes

survive. On one occasion T.C. Fry called in his network theory group, which included at that time Bode, Darlington and R.L. Dietzold among others, and told them: "You fellows had better not sign up for any graduate courses or other outside work this coming year because you are going to take over the network design that Ed Norton has been doing singlehanded."

Nodal Analysis
In electric circuits analysis, nodal analysis, node-voltage analysis, or the branch current method is a method of determining the voltage (potential difference) between "nodes" (points where elements or branches connect) in an electrical circuit in terms of the branch currents. In analyzing a circuit using Kirchhoff's circuit laws, one can either do nodal analysis using Kirchhoff's current law (KCL) or mesh analysis using Kirchhoff's voltage law (KVL). Nodal analysis writes an equation at each electrical node, requiring that the branch currents incident at a node must sum to zero. The branch currents are written in terms of the circuit node voltages. As a consequence, each branch constitutive relation must give current as a function of voltage; an admittance representation. For instance, for a resistor, Ibranch = Vbranch * G, where G (=1/R) is the admittance (conductance) of the resistor. Nodal analysis is possible when all the circuit elements' branch constitutive relations have an admittance representation. Nodal analysis produces a compact set of equations for the network, which can be solved by hand if small, or can be quickly solved using linear algebra by computer. Because of the compact system of equations, many circuit simulation programs (e.g. SPICE) use nodal analysis as a basis. When elements do not have admittance representations, a more general extension of nodal analysis, modified nodal analysis, can be used. While simple examples of nodal analysis focus on linear elements, more complex nonlinear networks can also be solved with nodal analysis by using Newton's method to turn the nonlinear problem into a sequence of linear problems.

SUPER POSITION THEOREM

The superposition theorem is a method which allows to determine the current through or the voltage across any resistor or branch in a network. The advantage of using this approach instead of mesh analysis or nodal analysis is that it is not necessary to use several equations to get required voltage or current. The theorem states the following: The total current through or voltage across a resistor or branch may be determined by summing the effects due to each independent source.

In order to apply the superposition theorem it is necessary to remove all sources other than the one being examined. In order to 'zero' a voltage source, replace it with a short circuit, since the voltage across a short circuit is zero volts. A current source is zeroed by replacing it with an open circuit, since the current through an open circuit is zero amps. If the purpose to determine the power dissipated by any resistor, first it must find either the voltage across the resistor or the current through the resistor: