Name Walter Fuchs | ||
Books Physics for the Modern Mind, Computers: Information Theory and Cybernetics | ||
Walter Robert Fuchs (March 18, 1937 in Princeton – 21 July, 1976 in Munich) was an American-German science communicator and science popularizer.
Life and work
Fuchs was born in Princeton, where his father worked as a bank clerk. He went to Memmingen school (graduating in 1956), was trained as an electrician and mechanic, and then studied electrical engineering at the Munich Technical University as well as physics, mathematics and philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. With a dissertation on "Logical problems of classical mechanics and quantum theory", he received his doctorate in 1961. In 1962 he was business editor at television program of Bavarian Radio studios, and since 1965 he had headed the editorial of Applied Science and Technology. Fuchs spent his life in Munich and died at the age of 39 from cancer.
Fuchs wrote mostly in German; his books were translated into English and other languages and met an internationally wide audience. In 1970, his books had a total circulation of 750,000 sold copies, especially for math and science subjects. Modern mathematics was translated into fourteen languages, as in the later 1960s, and it helped to popularize the concepts of sets theory.
Fuchs was a trained artist and supplied many of the templates for the illustrations of his own works; in his time in Munich, he played clarinet and saxophone in various jazz bands. In 1972 he published his satire The Dogs Planet, a fiction novel.