1880 births

Theodor_Becker_(actor)

Theodor Becker (18 February 1880, Mannheim – 26 June 1952, Coppenbrügge) was a German stage and film actor. He was married to Maria Fein and was the father of Maria Becker. Becker acted mostly at the Niedersächsisches Staatstheater Hannover but also appeared on the Berlin stage as well as in a number of silent films.

Franz_Hessel

Franz Hessel (November 21, 1880 – January 6, 1941) was a German writer and translator. With Walter Benjamin, he produced a German translation of three volumes of Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 work À la recherche du temps perdu in the late 1920s.
Hessel's parents, Fanny and Heinrich Hessel, came to Berlin in 1880, and joined the Lutheran church (having been born Jewish). In 1900, when Franz Hessel's father dies, he left a large fortune, enabling Franz Hessel to live a carefree life in Munich and Paris. In 1901, he attends the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he publishes twelve poems in Avalun. Ein Jahrbuch neuer deutscher lyrischer Wortkunst. In 1908, he publishes his first prose prose collection, Laura Wunderl. Müncher Novellen. In 1913, he marries Helen Grund, and publishes Der Kramladen des Glücks. On 27 July 1914, their first son Ulrich is born, and in 1917, their second son Stefan is born. In 1920, he publishes Pariser Romanze. In 1922, he publishes Von den Irrtümern der Liebenden. Eine Nachtwache.Hessel became one of the first German exponents of the French idea of flânerie, and in 1929 published a collection of essays on the subject related to his native Berlin, Walking in Berlin (German: Spazieren in Berlin). Reviewing the book in 1929, Benjamin described it as "an echo of the stories the city has told [Hessel] ever since he was a child—an epic book through and through, a process of memorizing while strolling around, a book for which memory has acted not as the source but as the Muse." Concluding, Benjamin wrote: "if a Berliner is willing to explore his city for any treasures other than neon advertisements, he will grow to love this book."In October 1938, the Hessels flee Germany for exile in Paris. In April 1940, the family flees Paris for Sanary-sur-Mer. In May, Franz and Ulrich are interned in Camp des Milles. On 27 July 1940, both are released and are able to return to Helen in Sanary-sur-Mer. However, Franz has dysentery, and has suffered a stroke, from which he does not recover.: 167–180 Hessel inspired the character of Jules in Henri-Pierre Roche's novel Jules et Jim.

Traugott_Konstantin_Oesterreich

Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (15 September 1880, in Stettin (Szczecin) – 28 July 1949, in Tübingen) was a German religious psychologist and philosopher.
Oesterreich was also interested in parapsychology. He argued against the philosophy of materialism.He was the author of Die Besessenheit (1921), a book on demonic possession. It was translated into English in 1966. William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, was influenced by the book.

Max_Trautz

Max Trautz (19 March 1880 – 19 August 1960) was a German chemist. He was very productive with over 190 scientific publications especially in the field of chemical kinetics. He was the first to investigate the activation energy of molecules by connecting Max Planck's new results concerning light with observations in chemistry.
He is also known as the founder of collision theory together with the British scientist William Lewis. While Trautz published his work in 1916, Lewis published it in 1918. However, they were unaware of each other's work due to World War I.

Harald_Schering

Harald Ernst Malmsten Schering (November 25, 1880 – April 10, 1959) was a German physicist born in Göttingen. He is best known for his work in high voltage electricity and the Schering Bridge used in electrical engineering. Schering was the son of Ernst Schering, mathematician at the Göttingen Observatory. His mother came from a family of Swedish academics who worked with Ernst to translate works from French and Italian. Harald grew up with his two siblings in Göttingen and studied physics at the University of Göttingen. In 1903 he worked at the Geophysical Institute and obtained a Ph.D. in 1904 under Eduard Riecke with work on the Elster-Geitel dispersal apparatus. Beginning in 1905 he was a scientific assistant at the Physics and Technology Institute in Berlin Charlottenburg; today known as the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). His work at the PTB under Emil Warburg primarily dealt with high voltage/high current research and development, and in 1914 he developed a measurement methodology for examining current transformers. In 1914 he was drafted into the First World War and was injured in 1916. In 1918 he became head of the high-voltage lab, succeeding Karl Willy Wagner. In 1919 he attained the title of professor at PTB with an annual salary of 4500 Marks and 1500 Marks as housing allowance. In 1924 he wrote a book on insulators in high voltage. A new institute was established in Hannover, buts construction was delayed by the war. Beginning in 1927, Schering was a professor of electrical engineering and high voltage technology at the Technical University of Hannover (today known as the Leibniz University Hannover). In 1933, he signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. He retired in 1949 but continued to work at the PTB until 1954 when Gerhard Pfestdorf took up a position to head the institution.Schering is remembered for invention of the Schering Bridge, which he developed along with Ernst Alberti is an AC bridge circuit used to measure capacitance and the dissipation factor of capacitors. Schering received a Golden Doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1954 and an honorary doctorate from Braunschweig. He was awarded the Great Cross of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.

Norbert_Jacques

Norbert Jacques (6 June 1880 – 15 May 1954) was a Luxembourgish novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and translator who wrote in German. He was born in Luxembourg-Eich, Luxembourg and died in Koblenz, West Germany. He created the character Dr. Mabuse, who was a feature of some of his novels. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, the first novel to feature Mabuse, was one of the bestsellers of its time; it sold over 500,000 copies in Germany. Today, Jacques is known best for Dr. Mabuse. In 1922, he received German citizenship.

Oskar_Perron

Oskar Perron (7 May 1880 – 22 February 1975) was a German mathematician.
He was a professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1914 to 1922 and at the University of Munich from 1922 to 1951. He made numerous contributions to differential equations and partial differential equations, including the Perron method to solve the Dirichlet problem for elliptic partial differential equations. He wrote an encyclopedic book on continued fractions Die Lehre von den Kettenbrüchen. He introduced Perron's paradox to illustrate the danger of assuming that the solution of an optimization problem exists:

Let N be the largest positive integer. If N > 1, then N2 > N, contradicting the definition of N. Hence N = 1.

Antonino_Lo_Surdo

Antonino Lo Surdo (4 February 1880 in Syracuse – 7 June 1949 in Rome) was an Italian physicist. He was appointed as professor of physics at the Istituto di Fisica in Rome in 1919; upon the death of Orso Mario Corbino in 1937, he became the director. Lo Surdo studied terrestrial physics, including seismology and geophysics; the 1908 Messina earthquake caused the death of his parents and other close relatives, except his brother. He contributed to the foundation of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica under the auspices of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, when its president was Guglielmo Marconi.
His name is remembered for the discovery (made independently by Johannes Stark) in 1913 of the effect on an electric field on the emission spectrum of a gas. This physical phenomenon is called the Stark-Lo Surdo effect in Italy (and is generally known outside Italy simply as the Stark effect). The discovery of the effect was a remarkably important contribution to the development of the quantum theory. Lo Surdo's discovery of the effect led Antonio Garbasso to introduce quantum theory into the Italian universities.