Wilhelm Wien

Wilhelm Wien (1864-1928), German physicist and Nobel laureate, noted for his work on black-body radiation (see Heat Transfer). Wien was born in Gaffken and educated at the universities of Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin. In 1890 he became an assistant to the German physicist Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz at the Imperial Physical Technical Institute at Charlottenburg. At various times from 1900 until his death, Wien was professor of physics at the universities of Giessen, Würzburg, and Munich. He also visited (1913) the U.S. to lecture at Columbia University.

Wien developed a formula for determining the energy density associated with particular wavelengths for any given temperature of a radiating body. His contributions to the field of radiation laid the foundation for the development of the quantum theory. Wien conducted research in other fields, including optics and X rays. For his discovery of laws of heat radiation he was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in physics.