Martin Schwarzschild

Martin Schwarzschild
Born	(1912-05-31)May 31, 1912 Foreign Member of the Royal Society[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Physics Astronomy
Institutions	Columbia University[2] Princeton University
Doctoral students	Emilia Pisani Belserene

Martin Schwarzschild (May 31, 1912 – April 10, 1997) was a

astrophysicist.

Biography

Schwarzschild was born in Potsdam into a distinguished German Jewish academic family. His father was the physicist Karl Schwarzschild and his uncle the astrophysicist Robert Emden. His sister, Agathe Thornton, became a classics scholar in New Zealand.

In line with a request in his father's will, his family moved to Göttingen in 1916. Schwarzschild studied at the University of Göttingen and took his doctoral examination in December 1936. He left Germany in 1936 for Norway and then the United States. Schwarzschild served in the US army intelligence. He was awarded the

for his wartime service. After returning to the US, he married fellow astronomer Barbara Cherry (1914–2008).^[3][4] In 1947, Martin Schwarzschild joined his lifelong friend, Lyman Spitzer at Princeton University. Spitzer died 10 days before Schwarzschild.

Schwarzschild's work in the fields of

He and Härm were the first to compute stellar models going through thermal pulses on the asymptotic giant branch^[6] and later showed that these models develop convective zones between the helium- and hydrogen-burning shells,^[7] which can bring nuclear ashes to the visible surface. Schwarzschild's 1958 book Structure and Evolution of the Stars^[8] taught a generation of astrophysicists how to apply electronic computers to the computation of stellar models.

In the 1950s and ’60s he headed the Stratoscope projects, which took instrumented balloons to unprecedented heights. The first Stratoscope produced high resolution images of solar granules and sunspots, confirming the existence of convection in the solar atmosphere, and the second obtained infrared spectra of planets, red giant stars, and the nuclei of galaxies. In his later years he made significant contributions toward understanding the dynamics of elliptical galaxies. Schwarzschild was renowned as a teacher and held major leadership positions in several scientific societies.

In the 1980s, Schwarzschild applied his numerical skills to building models for triaxial galaxies. ^[9]

Schwarzschild was the Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Princeton University, where he spent most of his professional life.^[10]

Honors

Awards

• Karl Schwarzschild Medal (1959)
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1960)^[11]
• National Academy of Sciences (1960)^[12]
• Eddington Medal (1963)
• Bruce Medal (1965)^[13]
• Rittenhouse Medal (1966)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1969)^[14]
• Brouwer Award (1992)
• Balzan Prize (1994, with Fred Hoyle)
• National Medal of Science (1997)

Memberships

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1954)^[15]
• United States National Academy of Sciences (1956)^[16]
• American Philosophical Society (1981)^[17]

Named after him

• 4463 Marschwarzschild

See also

• Stratoscope
• Perhapsatron
• Betelgeuse
• Interchange instability

References

External links

• Published papers of Martin Schwarzschild on SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System
• D. Merritt, Martin Schwarzschild's Contributions to Galaxy Dynamics
• Oral history interview with Martin Schwarzschild, 4 sessions, 1977. Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD.
• Oral history interview with Martin Schwarzschild, 1986.
  Charles Babbage Institute
  , University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.