Name Martin Klein | Role Historian | |
Died March 28, 2009, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States Books Paul Ehrenfest: The making of a theoretical physicist, Physicists' Inaugural Lectures in History, Paul Ehrenfest Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1948), Columbia University (1942) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada People also search for Robert Schulmann, Jurgen Renn, Anne Jacob Kox, Albert Einstein | ||
Martin Jesse Klein (June 25, 1924 – March 28, 2009), usually cited as M. J. Klein, was a science historian of 19th and 20th century physics.
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Biography
Klein was born in the Bronx, New York City. He was an only child and both his parents were schoolteachers. When he was 14 years old, he graduated from James Monroe High School. He received from Columbia University in 1942 a bachelor's degree in mathematics and in 1944 a master's degree in physics. In 1948 he received a Ph.D. in physics under László Tisza at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From 1949 to 1966 Klein was a member of the staff of the physics department of Cleveland's Case Institute of Technology, starting as a instructor and becoming a full professor in 1960. In the 1950s he became more interested in the history of physics. During the academic year 1958–1959 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Lorentz Institute of the University of Leiden. In 1967 he became a professor at Yale University in the Department of the History of Science and Medicine and in 1971 became the chair of the department. In 1977, due to fiscal concerns, Yale University eliminated the department and Klein became a professor in the physics department, where he remained until his retirement.
In the 1960s Martin extended his historical range and published a series of seminal papers by Max Planck and Einstein on the foundation of quantum theory. He also translated into English and published letters on wave mechanics by Einstein, Schrödinger, Planck, and Hendrik Lorentz. In 1966–67 he received a second Guggenheim fellowship to complete his biography of Ehrenfest, titled Paul Ehrenfest: The Making of a Theoretical Physicist (North-Holland, 1970), which was greeted with acclaim by both physicists and historians of science. Martin later turned to the investigation of the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in the 19th century, writing important papers on Ludwig Boltzmann, Sadi Carnot, Rudolf Clausius, J. Willard Gibbs, and James Clerk Maxwell.
From 1963 to 1979 Klein wrote 20 articles devoted exclusively to Einstein's work. From 1988 to 1998 he was the editor-in-chief of the "The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein" published by Princeton University Press. The Einstein Papers Project started in the mid-1970s and published 2 volumes before Klein took over. He led the team that produced volumes 3 through 6, covering Einstein's papers from 1909 through 1917.
At Yale University, he was the Eugene Higgins emeritus professor of the history of physics and an emeritus professor of physics. He was elected to the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences (1971), the National Academy of Sciences (1977) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1979).
In 2005 Klein was the first recipient of the Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, a joint award of the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. His doctoral students include Russell McCormmach.
He died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.