Born Lüneburg, (Niedersachsen, Germany), 11 December 1826
Died Lüneburg, (Niedersachsen, Germany), 26 February 1908
August Ritter, a pioneer in the theory of stellar structure, obtained fundamental results by applying the relatively recent laws of thermodynamics, as enunciated by Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), to a gaseous model of the Sun. He took up the problem where Jonathan Lane had left it and carried the mathematical development forward to where Robert Emden could turn it into a fully developed theory of a perfect gaseous sphere.
The entire subject of solar physics in the period from 1870 to 1890 was in a state of rapid flux, invigorated by the prospect of investigating the physical constitution of the stars by means of spectral analysis. Ritter’s highly mathematical contributions, coming from a relatively unknown faculty member at a small polytechnic school, found few appreciative readers at the time.
Ritter began his studies in 1843 at the polytechnic school...
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Selected References
Chandrasekhar, S. (1939). An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, esp. “Bibliographical Notes,” pp. 176–180.
Jungnickel, Christa and Russell McCormmach (1986). Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein. Vol. 2, p. 55. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Poggendorff, J. C. “Ritter.” In Biographisch-literarisches Handwörterbuch. Vol. 3 (1898): 1125; Vol. 4 (1904): 1256; Vol. 5 (1926): 1056. Leipzig and Berlin.
Ritter, A. (1898). “On the Constitution of Gaseous Celestial Bodies.” Astrophysical Journal 8: 293–315. (An English translation and reprint of Ritter’s 16th paper from the Annalen der Physik. The “Editorial Introduction,” pp. 293–295, contains a complete bibliography of Ritter’s 18 papers.)
Struve, Otto and Velta Zebergs (1962). Astronomy of the 20th Century. New York: Macmillan.
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Meo, M. (2014). Ritter, Georg August Dietrich. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_1174
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