Died 15 June 1968, Augsburg, Germany | ||
Wilhelm Carl Gottlieb Müller (September 25, 1880 – June 16, 1968) was a German physicist, mathematician, and philosopher. He is best known as the successor of Arnold Sommerfeld as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich.
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Life
Wilhelm Müller was born in Hamburg, the son of a merchant.
He studied at the Leipzig University and earned his Rigorosum in mathematics, physics, and philosophy with the grade "very good". He went on to earn his PhD with Otto Hölder and Karl Rohn and a dissertation called "The rational curve of degree five in the five-, four-, three- and two-dimensional space" in 1911. At the University of Hanover Müller got his habilitation and became a Privatdozent 1921, and later was appointed ausserordentliche professor. In 1928 Wilhelm Müller became professor at the Charles University in Prague. He joined the NSDAP in 1933, and went on to join the SA in 1936. In 1934 Müller accepted a position as professor and director of the Aeronautical Institute at RWTH Aachen University.
His appointment in 1939 as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich, which had been vacant for several years, was at the center of the controversy between modern physics and German physics. Müller, an aerodynamicist, had not been thought of as a theoretical physicist before this. He was dismissed in 1945.