Paul Karl Ludwig Drude was a German physicist who worked in the field of optics. He is best known for creating the Drude model. He was born on July 12, 1863, and died on July 5, 1906.
Biography
Paul Karl Ludwig Drude was born on July 12, 1863, in Braunschweig. He started studying mathematics at the University of Göttingen but later switched his focus to physics. In 1887, he earned his Ph.D. under Woldemar Voigt with a thesis about how light reflects and bends in crystals.
Drude graduated in the same year that Heinrich Hertz began sharing results from experiments testing James Clerk Maxwell’s theories about electromagnetism. This means Drude started his career when Maxwell’s ideas were becoming widely known in Germany.
In 1894, Drude became an associate professor at the University of Leipzig. That same year, he married Emilie Regelsberger, and together they had four children.
His early work involved measuring the optical properties of solids with very high accuracy. He then studied how these properties relate to a material’s electrical behavior and structure. In 1894, he introduced the symbol c to represent the speed of light in a perfect vacuum.
Near the end of his time at Leipzig, Drude was asked to write a textbook on optics. The book, Lehrbuch der Optik, published in 1900, combined the separate fields of electricity and optics. Drude called this a major breakthrough in science.
In 1900, Drude became the editor of Annalen der Physik, one of the most respected physics journals of the time. That same year, he created a model that explains the thermal, electrical, and optical properties of matter. This model is now known as the Drude model. In 1901, he was named a full professor of physics at the University of Giessen.
In 1905, Drude became the director of the Physics Institute at the University of Berlin. In 1906, at the peak of his career, he joined the Prussian Academy of Sciences. A few days after giving a speech to mark his appointment, he died by suicide. He was survived by his wife and children.
Honors
- The Drude crater on the Moon is named after him.
- The Paul Drude Institute, in Berlin, was established in his honor.