Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) and Enrico Fermi (1901-54)

In 1900 AD, not many universities had independent physics departments. Paul A. M. Dirac had his degree in electrical engineering, and Eugene Wigner had his degree in chemical engineering. By 2000 AD, the largest academic unit in every university is its physics department. How did this happen?

To make a long story short, let us list doctoral students and post-doctoral associates produced by Sommerfeld and Fermi.

Arnold Sommerfeld

• Karl Bechert
• Hans Bethe (Nobel)
• Peter Debye (Nobel)
• Paul Sophus Epstein
• Paul Peter Ewald
• Herbert Frohlich
• Erwin Fues
• Ernst Guillemin
• Werner Heisenberg (Nobel)
• Walter Heitler
• Helmut Honl
• Ludwig Hopf
• Walther Kossel
• Adolf Kratzer
• Herbert Kroemer
• Alfred Lande
• Otto Laporte
• Wilhelm Lenz
• Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel)
• Linus Pauling (Nobel for chemistry, Nobel for peace)
• Rudolf Peierls
• Walter Rogowski
• Rudolf Seeliger
• Heinrich Welker
• Gregor Wentzel

  Arnold Sommerfeld was born in the German city of Koenigsberg, and he studied mathematical physics at the Albertina University of Koenigsberg. With his doctoral degree, he moved to Goettingen, Aachen, and to Munich. You can find these three cities on the map of Germany, but can you find Koenigsberg? Click here for a story.

  I heard about Arnold Sommerfeld for the first time in my junior year at Carnegie Tech (1957). At that time, the English translations of his Lectures on Theoretical Physics were very popular among physics students. I did not have enough money to buy them all, but I think I read his book on Optics carefully.

  In 2002, Prof. Jerzy Kocinski of Poland told me to read Sommerfeld's book on Electrodynamics. He gives there a detailed story about what happened at the Univ. of Koenigsberg during his years. Indeed, Sommerfeld describes well how Maxell's equations were developed into the present form by those Koenigsbergers.

Enrico Fermi

• Edoardo Amaldi
• Owen Chamberlain (Nobel)
• Geoffrey Chew
• Mildred Dresselhaus
• Jerome I. Friedman (Nobel)
• Richard Garwin
• Marvin L. Goldberger
• Tsung-Dao Lee (Nobel)
• Ettore Majorana
• Bruno Pontecorvo
• James Rainwater (Nobel)
• Marshall Rosenbluth
• Arthur H. Rosenfeld
• Emilio Segre (Nobel)
• Jack Steinberger (Nobel)
• Sam Treiman
• Leona Woods
• Chen Ning Yang (Nobel)
• Gaurang Yodh Enrico Fermi studied in Pisa, and did his Nobel-prize winning research while at the University of Rome. His father was an admiral in Italian navy, but his wife was Jewish. Thus, he had to immigrate to the United States 1939. He came first to Columbia University and then settled down at the University of Chicago.

  Many people of my generation went into physics because of Fermi. I started as an electrical engineering major at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh (now called Carnegie Mellon University). After hearing about its 450-Mev cyclotron, I changed to physics. The Carnegie cyclotron was a copy of Fermi's cyclotron at the University of Chicago.

  When I went to Princeton, I took a field theory course from Sam Treiman, and he followed Gregor Wentzel's book on quantum field theory. Wentzel was Sommerfeld's student and went to the University of Chicago and spent years together with Fermi. Wentzel's name comes first in the "WKB" method.

  Sam Treiman was Fermi's student at the University of Chicago, and I was his 5th PhD student. Here is my photo with him. Treiman's first student was Steven Weinberg. I also have an image of Treiman with Weinberg which appeared in one of Princeton campus newspapers in 1985. I am thus a very legitimate member of Enrico Fermi genealogy. I have two volumes of Fermi's collected papers, which serve as the source of my ancestral wisdom.

  After coming to the University of Maryland, I met Gaurang Yodh, who was also Fermi's student at the University of . The transformation from a student to a professor is not an easy process. As a senior member, Yodh gave me many helpful advices. Here is my photo with him taken in 2003. Yodh still enjoys his active research in physics, and we should all learn a lesson from him.

  I copied the lists of students and associates of Fermi and Sommerfeld from their respective Wikipedia pages. I added Chen Ning Yang and Gaurang Yodh to Fermi's list. If combined into one webpage, those two lists become more powerful. They tell you how Sommerfeld and Fermi changed the physics world. As you may have noticed before, this is my way of doing physics: combine two or three to get a new result.