Rudolf Ladenburg


Rudolf Walter Ladenburg was a German atomic physicist. He emigrated from Germany as early as 1932 and became a Brackett Research Professor at Princeton University. When the wave of German emigration began in 1933, he was the principal coordinator for job placement of exiled physicists in the United States.

Background

Ladenburg was the son of the Jewish chemist Albert Ladenburg, ordinarius professor of chemistry at the University of Kiel and then at the former University of Breslau. He was a non-practicing Jew and an atheist.

Education

From 1900 to 1906, Ladenburg studied at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, the Universität Breslau, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He received his doctorate under Wilhelm Röntgen at Munich.

Career

After completion of his Habilitation, Ladenburg became a Privatdozent at Breslau and in 1921 an ausserordentlicher Professor there. In 1924, he took an appointment at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität along with becoming a scientific member of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft.
Ladenburg went to the United States as early as 1930, where he became a Brackett Research Professor at the Palmer Physics Laboratory, Princeton University. When the emigration wave from Germany began in April 1933, Ladenburg was the principal coordinator for the employment of exiled physicists in the United States. He retired from Princeton in 1950.

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