Christian Doppler

Christian Doppler (1803-53), Austrian physicist and mathematician. Christian Johann Doppler was born in Salzburg and educated there and in Vienna. He was a professor successively at the Technical Institute at Prague and at the Polytechnicum of Vienna, and he became director of the Physical Institute of Vienna University in 1850. He described the physical phenomenon now known as the Doppler effect in his monograph on the color effect of double stars, Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne (1842).