University of Zurich

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physicist, who, on 8 November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range... today known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. Röntgen was born in a traditional Catholic family in Lennep, Germany as the only child of a merchant and manufacturer of cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam. In March 1848, the family moved to Apeldoorn and Wilhelm was raised in the Netherlands. He received his early education at the boarding school, Institute of Martinus Herman van Doorn, in Apeldoorn. From 1861 to 1863, he attended the ambachtsschool in Utrecht. He was expelled for refusing to reveal the identity of a classmate guilty of drawing an unflattering portrait of one of the school's teachers. Not only was he expelled, he subsequently found that he could not gain admittance into any other Dutch or German gymnasium. In 1865, he tried to attend the University of Utrecht without having the necessary credentials required for a regular student.
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Alfred Werner was a Swiss chemist who was a student at ETH Zurich and a professor at the University of Zurich. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry... in 1913 for proposing the octahedral configuration of transition metal complexes. Werner developed the basis for modern coordination chemistry. He was the first inorganic chemist to win the Nobel prize, and the only one prior to 1973. Werner was born in 1866 in Mulhouse, Alsace . He went to Switzerland to study chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich where he obtained his doctorate in 1890 at the same institution. After postdoctoral study in Paris, he returned to the Swiss Federal Institute to teach , in 1893 he moved to the University of Zurich where he became a professor in 1895. The same year he became a Swiss citizen. In 1893, Werner was the first to propose correct structures for coordination compounds containing complex ions, in which a central transition metal atom is surrounded by neutral or anionic ligands.
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Albert Einstein ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955 was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity,... effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc , he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics. Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity.
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Walter Rudolf Hess was a Swiss physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949 for mapping the areas of the brain involved in... the control of internal organs. He shared the prize with Egas Moniz. Hess was born in Frauenfeld. He received his medical degree from the University of Zürich in 1906 and trained as surgeon and ophthalmologist. In 1912, he left his lucrative private practice as an ophthalmologist and went into research. His main interests were the regulation of blood flow and respiration. As an outgrowth of these research interests, he began mapping the parts of the diencephalon that control the internal organs. From 1917 to 1951, he served as professor and director of the Department of the Physiological Institute at the University of Zürich. Hess died in Locarno, Switzerland.
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Albert Einstein ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955 was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity,... effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc , he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics. Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity.
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Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was an Austrian born physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum... mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. In 1935 he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. In 1887 Schrödinger was born in Vienna, Austria to Rudolf Schrödinger and Georgine Emilia Brenda . His mother was half Austrian and half English; His father was Catholic and his mother was Lutheran. Despite having a religious background, he was later said to be an atheist. In 1898 he attended the Akademisches Gymnasium. Between 1906 and 1910 Schrödinger studied in Vienna under Franz Serafin Exner and Friedrich Hasenöhrl . He also conducted experimental work with Karl Wilhelm Friedrich "Fritz" Kohlrausch 1884–1953. In 1911 Schrödinger became an assistant to Exner.
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Peter Joseph William Debye FRS was a Dutch physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in... Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye attended the Aachen University of Technology, Rhenish Prussia just 30 km away in 1901. He studied mathematics and classical physics, and, in 1905, received a degree in electrical engineering. In 1907, he published his first paper, a mathematically elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye. In 1906, Sommerfeld received an appointment at Munich, Bavaria, and took Debye with him as his assistant. Debye got his Ph.D. with a dissertation on radiation pressure in 1908. In 1910, he derived the Planck radiation formula using a method which Max Planck agreed was simpler than his own. In 1911, when Albert Einstein took an appointment as a professor at Prague, Bohemia, Debye took his old professorship at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
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Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering... several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages. Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1934. In 1959 he earned a degree in Electronics Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich . In 1960 he earned an M.Sc. from Université Laval, Canada. Then in 1963 he was awarded a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by the computer designer pioneer Harry Huskey. From 1963 to 1967 he served as assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zurich. Then in 1968 he became Professor of Informatics at ETH Zürich, taking two one-year sabbaticals at Xerox PARC in California . Wirth retired in 1999. Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon, Oberon-2, and Oberon-07.
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