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- He died due to complications after surgery which had attempted to cure his condition, some consider his ailment to have been caused by a malignant bone condition. [ 9 ]
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In the 1850s and 60s, building on the publications of William Thomson, Helmholtz and William Rankine popularized the idea of the heat death of the universe. In fluid dynamics, Helmholtz made several contributions, including Helmholtz's theorems for vortex dynamics in inviscid fluids.
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Hermann von Helmholtz, (born August 31, 1821, Potsdam, Prussia [Germany]—died September 8, 1894, Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany), German scientist and philosopher who made fundamental contributions to physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology. He is best known for his statement of the law of the conservation of energy. He b...
Helmholtz was the eldest of four children and because of his delicate health was confined to home for his first seven years. His father was a teacher of philosophy and literature at the Potsdam Gymnasium, and his mother was descended from William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. From his mother came the calm and reserve that marked him all his life. From his father came a rich, but mixed, intellectual heritage. His father taught him the classical languages, as well as French, English, and Italian. He also introduced him to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte and to the approach to nature that flowed from their philosophical insights. This “Nature philosophy,” in the hands of early 19th-century investigators, became a speculative science in which it was felt that scientific conclusions could be deduced from philosophical ideas, rather than from empirical data gathered from observations of the natural world. Much of Helmholtz’s later work was devoted to refuting this point of view. His empiricism, however, was always deeply influenced by the aesthetic sensitivity passed on to him by his father, and music and painting played a large part in his science.
After graduating from the gymnasium, Helmholtz in 1838 entered the Friedrich Wilhelm Medical Institute in Berlin, where he received a free medical education on the condition that he serve eight years as an army doctor. At the institute he did research under the greatest German physiologist of the day, Johannes Müller. He attended physics lectures, worked his way through the standard textbooks of higher mathematics, and learned to play the piano with a skill that later helped him in his work on the sensation of tone.
On graduation from medical school in 1843, Helmholtz was assigned to a regiment at Potsdam. Because his army duties were few, he did experiments in a makeshift laboratory he set up in the barracks. At that time he also married Olga von Velten, daughter of a military surgeon. Before long, Helmholtz’s obvious scientific talents led to his release from military duties. In 1848 he was appointed assistant at the Anatomical Museum and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, moving the next year to Königsberg, in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad), to become assistant professor and director of the Physiological Institute. But Königsberg’s harsh climate was injurious to his wife’s health, and in 1855 he became professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Bonn, moving in 1858 to Heidelberg. During these years his scientific interests progressed from physiology to physics. His growing scientific stature was further recognized in 1871 by the offer of the professorship of physics at the University of Berlin; in 1882, by his elevation to the nobility; and, in 1888, by his appointment as first director of the Physico-Technical Institute at Berlin, the post that he held for the rest of his life.
Britannica Quiz
Philosophy 101
The variety of positions he held reflects his interests and competence but does not reflect the way in which his mind worked. He did not start out in medicine, move to physiology, then drift into mathematics and physics. Rather, he was able to coordinate the insights he had acquired from his experience in these disciplines and to apply them to every problem he examined. His greatest work, Handbook of Physiological Optics (1867), was characterized—like all of his scientific works—by a keen philosophical insight, molded by exact physiological investigations, and illustrated with mathematical precision and sound physical principles.
- L. Pearce Williams
Later Life and Death: Hermann von Helmholtz spent his later life trying to cut down all of electrodynamics to a minimum set of mathematical principles, however without success. Helmholtz died on September 8, 1894. He was 73 years old.
Feb 18, 2008 · Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) participated in two of the most significant developments in physics and in the philosophy of science in the 19th century: the proof that Euclidean geometry does not describe the only possible visualizable and physical space, and the shift from physics based on actions between particles at a distance to the ...
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31, 1821 – September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist. In the words of the 1911 Britannica, "his life from first to last was one of devotion to science, and he must be accounted, on intellectual grounds, as one of the foremost men of the 19th century".
Helmholtz died in 1894 as the result of a fall suffered on board ship while on his way back to Germany from the United States, after representing Germany at the Electrical Congress in Chicago in August, 1893. It is difficult to exaggerate the influence Helmholtz had on nineteenth-century science, not only in Germany but throughout the world.
Died. 8 September 1894. Berlin, Germany. Summary. Hermann von Helmholtz was a German mathematician who trained as a medical doctor and made important contributions to mathematical physics, optics and acoustics as well as to physiology and psychology. View fifteen larger pictures. Biography.
