Christian Andreas Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He is celebrated for his principle – known as the Doppler effect – that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer. He used this concept to explain the color of binary stars.
Biography
Doppler was born in Salzburg in 1803. After completing high school, Doppler studied philosophy in Salzburg and mathematics and physics at the Imperial–Royal Polytechnic Institute, where he became an assistant in 1829. In 1835 he began work at the Prague Polytechnic, where he received an appointment in 1841. , just next door to where Mozart's family had lived. A Doppler research-and memorial society is now housed there. in which Doppler lived from 1843 to 1847 One year later, at the age of 38, Doppler gave a lecture to the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences and subsequently published his most notable work, Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einiger anderer Gestirne des Himmels. There is a facsimile edition with an English translation by Alec Eden. In this work, Doppler postulated his principle that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer, and he later tried to use this concept for explaining the colour of binary stars. This was independently at the same time when physicist Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau became also involved in aspects of the discovery of the Doppler effect, which is known by the French as the Doppler-Fizeau Effect. Fizeau contributed towards understanding its effect with light rather than sound, and in doing so, corrected many of Doppler's persistent errors. He also developed the formal mathematical theorem underlying the principles of this effect. In 1848, he discovered the frequency shift of a wave when the source and receiver are moving relative to each other, therefore being the first to predict blue shifts and red shifts of light waves. Doppler continued working as a professor at the Prague Polytechnic, publishing over 50 articles on mathematics, physics and astronomy, but in 1847 he left Prague for the professorship of mathematics, physics, and mechanics at the Academy of Mines and Forests in Selmecbánya, and in 1849 he moved to Vienna. Doppler's research was interrupted by the revolutionary incidents of 1848. During the Hungarian Revolution, he fled to Vienna. There he was appointed head of the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Vienna in 1850. While there, Doppler, along with Franz Unger, influenced the development of young Gregor Mendel, the founding father ofgenetics, who was a student at the University of Vienna from 1851 to 1853. Doppler died on 17 March 1853 at age 49 from a pulmonary disease in Venice. His tomb, found by Dr. Peter M. Schuster, is just inside the entrance of the Venetian island cemetery of San Michele.
Full name
Some confusion exists about Doppler's full name. Doppler referred to himself as Christian Doppler. The records of his birth and baptism stated Christian Andreas Doppler. Forty years after Doppler's death the misnomer Johann Christian Doppler was introduced by the astronomer Julius Scheiner. Scheiner's mistake has since been copied by many.
