Hans Spemann (born June 27, 1869, Stuttgart, Württemberg – died Sept. 12, 1941, Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger.), German embryologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1935 for his discovery of the effect now known as embryonic induction, the influence exercised by various parts of the embryo that directs the development of groups of cells into particular tissues and organs.

Spemann, initially a medical student, attended the universities of Heidelberg, Munich, and Würzburg and graduated in zoology, botany, and physics. He worked at the Zoological Institute of Würzburg (1894–1908), held a professorship at Rostock (1908–14), was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin (1914–19), and occupied the chair of zoology at Freiburg (1919–35).

Hans Spemann was born in Stuttgart, the eldest son of publisher Wilhelm Spemann and his wife Lisinka, née Hoffman. After he left school in 1888 he spent a year in his father’s business, then, in 1889–1890, he did military service in the Kassel Hussars followed by a short time as a bookseller in Hamburg. In 1891 he entered the University of Heidelberg where he studied medicine, taking his preliminary examination in 1893. There he met the biologist and psychologist Gustav Wolff who had begun experiments on the embryological developments of newts and shown that, if the lens of a developing newt’s eye is removed, it regenerates.

In 1892 Spemann married Klara Binder with whom he had two sons. In 1893–1894 he moved to the University of Munich for clinical training but decided, rather than becoming a clinician, to move to the Zoological Institute at the University of Würzburg, where he remained as a lecturer until 1908. His degree in zoology, botany, and physics, awarded in 1895, followed study under Theodor Boveri, Julius Sachs and Wilhelm Röntgen.

For his Ph.D. thesis under Boveri, Spemann studied cell lineage in the parasitic worm Strongylus paradoxus, for his teaching diploma, the development of the middle ear in the frog.

Spemann’s name will always be associated with his work on experimental embryology. He made himself a master of micro-surgical technique and, working on the relatively large eggs of amphibians he discovered in 1924, together with Hilde Mangold, the existence of an area in the embryo, the portions of which, upon transplantation into an indifferent part of a second embryo there organized (induced) secondary embryonic primordia. The name «organizer center» or «organizer» was therefore given by him to those parts. For this discovery of the organizer effect in embryonic development, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935.

Later Spemann showed that different parts of the organization center produce different parts of the embryo. The anterior parts of it tend to produce parts of the head, and the posterior parts of it parts of the tail. Further, tail organizers, when they are grafted into the head region of another embryo, may produce heads instead of tails, the reason being that they are influenced by the head organizer in their new environment.

Earlier Spemann had transplanted the optic cups of new embryos into the outermost layer of the region of the abdomen and had found that they induced the production, in this new situation, of a lens of the eye. This was interpreted as being evidence of the existence of secondary organizers which operate after the induction exerted by the primary organizer has been completed.

By these and other experiments of a similar kind Spemann laid the foundations of the theory of embryonic induction by organizers, which led later to biochemical studies of this process and the ultimate development of the modern science of experimental morphogenesis. He described his researches in his book Embryonic Development and Induction (1938).

Spemann died at Freiburg on September 9, 1941.

Karl Freiherr von Drais (born on 29 April 1785 in Karlsruhe – died on 10 December 1851 in Karlsruhe as well) was a German forest official and significant inventor in the Biedermeier period.

Drais was a prolific inventor, who invented the Laufmaschine (“running machine”), also later called the Velocipede, Draisine (English) or draisienne (French), also nicknamed “the hobby horse” or “dandy horse”. This was his most popular and widely recognized invention. It incorporated the two-wheeler principle that is basic to the bicycle and motorcycle and was the beginning of mechanized personal transport.

 

This was the earliest form of a bicycle, without pedals. His first reported ride from Mannheim to the “Schwetzinger Relaishaus” (a coaching inn, located in “Rheinau”, today a district of Mannheim) took place on 12 June 1817 using Baden’s best road. Karl rode his bike; it was a distance of about 7 km (4.3 mi). The round trip took him a little more than an hour, but may be seen as the big bang for horseless transportation. However, after marketing the Velocipede it became apparent that roads were so rutted by carriages that it was hard to balance on the machine for long, so Velocipede riders took to the sidewalks and moved far too quickly, endangering pedestrians. Consequently, authorities in Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and even Calcutta banned its use, and after its brief moment in the limelight, the dandy-horse quickly faded into oblivion.

Drais also invented the earliest typewriter with a keyboard (1821). He later developed an early stenograph machine which used 16 characters (1827), a device to record piano music on paper (1812), the first meat grinder, and a wood-saving cooker including the earliest hay chest. He also invented two four-wheeled human powered vehicles (1813-1814), the second of which he presented in Vienna to the congress carving up Europe after Napoleon’s defeat. In later years he developed a foot-driven human powered railroad vehicle (1840) whose name “Draisine” is used even today for railroad handcars.

Drais was unable to market his inventions for profit because he was still a civil servant of Baden, even though he was being paid without providing active service. As a result, on 12 January 1818, Drais was awarded a grand-ducal privilege (Großherzogliches Privileg) to protect his inventions for 10 years in Baden by the younger Grand Duke Karl. Grand Duke Karl also appointed Drais Professor of Mechanics. This was merely an honorary title, not related to any university or other institution. Drais retired from the civil service and was awarded a pension for his appointment to Professor for Mechanical Science.

Иeing the fervent radical, Drais gave up his title of Baron in 1849б and dropped the “von” from his name. Subsequently, after the revolution collapsed, he was in a very bad position. The royalists tried to have him certified as mad and locked up. His pension was confiscated to help to pay for the “costs of revolution” after it was suppressed by the Prussians.

Karl Drais died penniless on 10 December 1851 in Karlsruhe. The house in which he lived last is just two blocks away from where at that time young Carl Benz was raised.

Carl von Linde was a German engineer (born on June 11, 1842 – died on November 16, 1934). Linde was best known for his refrigeration and gas separation technologies.

Carl von Linde was the first person to extract oxygen gas from the air, making it a commercially viable product and thus launching the industrial gas industry. He also developed modern refrigeration.

The discovery of oxygen and investigation of its role in chemical reactions was of crucial importance in changing the science of chemistry. Initially, however, the discovery had little impact outside the laboratory since oxygen could be produced only in the lab and in limited quantities by chemical or electrolytic means. It was the achievement of Carl von Linde in 1902 to take oxygen from the air itself, and he was soon extracting it in quantities approaching 1,000 cubic feet per hour. Oxygen became a common commodity that was supplied to hospitals and industries and was later used in rocket fuel.

Born in Berndorf, Germany as the son of a German-born minister and Swedish mother, was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, but took another direction entirely. Von Linde’s family moved to Münich, Bavaria in 1854 and eight years later he started a course in engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, where his teachers included Rudolf Clausius, Gustav Zeuner and Franz Reuleaux.

In 1864, he was expelled before graduating for participating in a student protest, but Reuleaux found him a position as an apprentice at the Kottern cotton-spinning plant in Kempten. Linde stayed only a short time before moving first to Borsig in Berlin and then to the new Krauss locomotive factory in Munich, where he worked as head of the technical department. Von Linde married Helene Grimm in September 1866; their marriage lasted 53 years and they had six children.

In 1868 Linde learned of a new university opening in Munich (the Technische Hochschule) and immediately applied for a job as a lecturer; he was accepted—at the age of 26—for the position. He became a full professor of mechanical engineering in 1872, and set up an engineering lab where students such as Rudolf Diesel studied.

His research there on heat theory, from 1873 to 1877, led to his invention of the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator. The company he established to promote this invention was an international success: refrigeration rapidly displaced ice in food handling and was introduced into many industrial processes.

After a decade Linde withdrew from managerial activities to refocus on research, and in 1895 he succeeded in liquefying air by first compressing it and then letting it expand rapidly, thereby cooling it. He then obtained oxygen and nitrogen from the liquid air by slow warming. In the early days of oxygen production, the biggest use by far for the gas was the oxyacetylene torch, invented in France in 1904, which revolutionized metal cutting and welding in the construction of ships, skyscrapers, and other iron and steel structures.

In 1897, Linde was appointed to the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown and ennobled in accordance with its statutes.

In addition to Linde’s technical and engineering abilities, he was a successful entrepreneur. He formed many successful partnerships in Germany and internationally, working effectively to exploit the value of his patents and knowledge through licensing arrangements.

One company formed to use Linde’s later patents was the Linde Air Products Company, founded in Cleveland in 1907. In 1917 Linde Air Products joined with four other companies that produced acetylene, among other products, to form Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation. In 1992, Linde Air again became an independent company—Praxair.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter (20 April 1805 – 8 July 1873) was a German artist best known for his airy, idealized portraits of European royalty that were influenced by the Rococo and Neoclassical painting.

Born in a small village in Germany’s Black Forest, Franz Xaver Winterhalter left his home to study painting at the academy in Munich. Before becoming court painter to Louis-Philippe, the king of France, he joined a circle of French artists in Rome. In 1835, after he painted the German Grand Duke and Duchess of Baden, Winterhalter’s international career as a court portrait painter was launched. Although he never received high praise for his work in his native Germany, the royal families of England, France, and Belgium all commissioned him to paint portraits. His monumental canvases established a substantial popular reputation, and lithographic copies of the portraits helped to spread his fame.

Winterhalter’s portraits were prized for their subtle intimacy, but his popularity among patrons came from his ability to create the image his sitters wished or needed to project to their subjects. He was able to capture the moral and political climate of each court, adapting his style to each client until it seemed as if his paintings acted as press releases, issued by a master of public relations.

After attending school at a Benedictine monastery in St. Blasien, Winterhalter left Menzenschwand in 1818 at the age of 13 to study drawing and engraving. He trained as a draughtsman and lithographer in the workshop of Karl Ludwig Schüler in Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1823, at the age of eighteen, he went to Munich, sponsored by the industrialist Baron von Eichtal. In 1825, he was granted a stipend by Ludwig I, Grand Duke of Baden and began a course of study at the Academy of Arts in Munich with Peter von Cornelius, whose academic methods made him uncomfortable. Winterhalter found a more congenial mentor in the fashionable portraitist Joseph Stieler. During this time, he supported himself working as lithographer.

Winterhalter entered court circles when in 1828 he became drawing master to Sophie Margravine of Baden, at Karlsruhe. His opportunity to establish himself beyond southern Germany came in 1832 when he was able to travel to Italy in 1833–1834, with the support of Grand Duke Leopold of Baden. In Rome he composed romantic genre scenes in the manner of Louis Léopold Robert and attached himself to the circle of the director of the French Academy, Horace Vernet. On his return to Karlsruhe he painted portraits of the Grand Duke Leopold of Baden and his wife, and was appointed painter to the grand-ducal court.

Nevertheless, he left Baden to move to France, where his Italian genre scene Il dolce Farniente attracted notice at the Salon of 1836. Il Decameron a year later was also praised; both paintings are academic compositions in the style of Raphael. In the Salon of 1838 he exhibited a portrait of the Prince of Wagram with his young daughter. His career as a portrait painter was soon secured when in the same year he painted Louise Marie of Orleans, Queen of the Belgians, and her son. It was probably through this painting that Winterhalter came to the notice of Maria Amalia of the Two Sicilies, Queen of the French, mother of the Queen of the Belgians.

In Paris, Winterhalter quickly became fashionable. He was appointed court painter of Louis-Philippe, the king of the French, who commissioned him to paint individual portraits of his large family. Winterhalter would execute more than thirty commissions for him.

This success earned the painter the reputation of a specialist in dynastic and aristocratic portraiture, skilled in combining likeness with flattery and enlivening official pomp with modern fashion.

However, Winterhalter’s reputation in artistic circles suffered. The critics, who had praised his debut in the salon of 1836, dismissed him as a painter who could not be taken seriously. This attitude persisted throughout Winterhalter’s career, condemning his work to a category of his own in the hierarchy of painting. Winterhalter himself regarded his first royal commissions as a temporary intermission before returning to subject painting and the field of academic respectability, but he was a victim of his own success, and for the rest of his life he worked almost exclusively as a portrait painter. His success in this field made him rich. Winterhalter became an international celebrity enjoying Royal patronage.

Over the course of his career, the artist was commissioned to paint Empress Eugenie, Princess Leonilla, and Queen Victoria, among others. However, he is most commonly associated with his renderings of Elizabeth “Sissi,” Empress of Austria, in which he showcases her expensive garments and flowing brown hair. Born on April 20, 1805 in Menzenschwand, Germany, Winterhalter studied at the Academy of Arts in Munich under the painter Peter von Cornelius. His was employed as drawing master to Sophie Margavine of Baden, and was soon after to serve as court painter King Louis-Phillipe of France. In 1841, Winterhalter served as the official court painter to Queen Victoria, producing a number of images of the queen and her family which were distributed across Britain. At the height of his career, the artist received an overwhelming number of commissions and many of his portraits were executed by his assistants. Winterhalter died on July 8, 1873 in Frankfurt, Germany at the age of 68. His work is currently held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery of London, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Caspar David Friedrich, (born on September 5, 1774, Greifswald, Pomerania [now in Germany] – died on May 7, 1840, Dresden, Saxony), was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. His vast, mysterious, atmospheric landscapes and seascapes proclaimed human helplessness against the forces of nature and did much to establish the idea of the Sublime as a central concern of Romanticism.

Friedrich’s paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs “the viewer’s gaze towards their metaphysical dimension”.

Friedrich studied from 1794 to 1798 at the Copenhagen Academy, one of the most progressive art schools of the day. Though he was taught by many painters, the school did not offer a course in painting. He settled at Dresden and became a member of an artistic and literary circle that included the painter Philipp Otto Runge and the writers Ludwig Tieck and Novalis.

His drawings in sepia, executed in his neat early style, won the poet J.W. von Goethe’s approval and half of the prize from the Weimar Art Society in 1805. His first important oil painting, The Cross in the Mountains (c. 1807; also called the Tetschen Altarpiece), established his mature style, characterized by an overwhelming sense of stillness and isolation, and was an attempt to replace the traditional symbology of religious painting with one drawn from nature.

Other symbolic landscapes, such as The Sea of Ice (1822; also called The Wreck of the Hope; now lost), which makes reference to Sir William Parry’s polar expedition, reveal his fatalism and his attitude toward Nature. Though they were based on close observation of the landscape, his works were colored by his imaginative response to the atmosphere of the Baltic coast and the Harz Mountains, which he found both awesome and ominous.

On 21 January 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a dyer from Dresden. The couple had three children, with their first, Emma, arriving in 1820. Physiologist and painter Carl Gustav Carus notes in his biographical essays that marriage did not impact significantly on either Friedrich’s life or personality, yet his canvasses from this period, including Chalk Cliffs on Rügen—painted after his honeymoon—display a new sense of levity, while his palette is brighter and less austere. Human figures appear with increasing frequency in the paintings of this period, which Siegel interprets as a reflection that “the importance of human life, particularly his family, now occupies his thoughts more and more, and his friends, his wife, and his townspeople appear as frequent subjects in his art.”

Around this time, he found support from two sources in Russia. In 1820, the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the behest of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited Friedrich’s studio and returned to Saint Petersburg with a number of his paintings, and exchange that began a patronage that continued for many years.

With dawn and dusk constituting prominent themes of his landscapes, Friedrich’s own later years were characterized by a growing pessimism. His work becomes darker, revealing a fearsome monumentality. The Wreck of the Hope (also known as The Polar Sea or The Sea of Ice (1823–24)) perhaps best summarizes Friedrich’s ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting was not well received. Completed in 1824, it depicted a grim subject, a shipwreck in the Arctic Ocean; “the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world’s immense and glacial indifference.”

In 1835 he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered, and a second stroke in 1837 caused him almost complete paralysis. His reputation was in decline by the time of his death as the Romantic movement gave way to Realism. For a long time his work was forgotten. It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.

Otto Hahn (1879-1968) was a German Chemist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 – for his work in discovering nuclear fission. He was a distinguished chemist who worked in the pioneering fields of radio chemistry. After the Second World War, he was a campaigner against the use of nuclear weapons and became an influential scientific figure in West Germany.

Hahn was the son of a glazier. Although his parents wanted him to become an architect, he eventually decided to study chemistry at the University of Marburg. There Hahn worked hard at chemistry, though he was inclined to absent himself from physics and mathematics lectures in favour of art and philosophy, and he obtained his doctorate in 1901. After a year of military service, he returned to the university as chemistry lecture assistant, hoping to find a post in industry later on.

In 1904 he went to London, primarily to learn English, and worked at University College with Sir William Ramsay, who was interested in radioactivity. While working on a crude radium preparation that Ramsay had given to him to purify, Hahn showed that a new radioactive substance, which he called radiothorium, was present.

Fired by this early success and encouraged by Ramsay, who thought highly of him, he decided to continue with research on radioactivity rather than go into industry. With Ramsay’s support he obtained a post at the University of Berlin. Before taking it up, he decided to spend several months in Montreal with Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford of Nelson) to gain further experience with radioactivity. Shortly after returning to Germany in 1906, Hahn was joined by Lise Meitner, an Austrian-born physicist, and five years later they moved to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry at Berlin-Dahlen. There Hahn became head of a small but independent department of radiochemistry.

After the war, Hahn and Meitner were among the first to isolate protactinium-231, an isotope of the recently discovered radioactive element protactinium. Because nearly all the natural radioactive elements had then been discovered, he devoted the next 12 years to studies on the application of radioactive methods to chemical problems.

In the late 1930s, the Hahn group made more progress on the study of Uranium and were the first scientists to measure the half-life of Uranium. By 1939, the Hahn group had discovered the basic mathematics of nuclear fission, and the fact that the uranium nuclei split when bombarded with atoms. However, they didn’t continue their work to its conclusion of producing the atomic bomb.

During the Second World war, Hahn and Fritz Strassmann continued to work on nuclear physics. At the end of World War II, he was interned in England on suspicion of working on the Germany nuclear programme. He was released in 1946.

Hahn and Strassmann were able to discover nuclear fission by exceptionally good chemistry.

During his time of internment, he was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry ‘for his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei’ He was unable to attend because of his internment in England. Some scientists have argued his colleague Meitner should have been awarded the prize jointly.

Hahn was shocked to learn that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan in 1945, to devastating effect. He felt guilty that he, in some way, may have been responsible for this great loss of life.

After the Second World War, he campaigned against the use of Nuclear weapons, and in 1955 initiated the Mainau Declaration which warned of the dangers of atomic weapons. He became a leading figure within post-war FDR and was a high profile critic of rearming West Germany with atomic weapons. His opposition to the nuclear arms race caused him to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1966, he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize – the only time it has been awarded to a non-American.

Between 1948 to 1960, Hahn was the founding President of the Max Planck Society for the advancement of science. Otto Hahn died in West Germany on 28th July 1968.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer), also known as Wanderer above the Mist or Mountaineer in a Misty Landscape, is an oil painting c. 1818 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. It has been considered one of the masterpieces of Romanticism and one of its most representative works. It currently resides in the Kunsthalle Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany.

In the foreground, a young man stands upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer. He is wrapped in a dark green overcoat, and grips a walking stick in his right hand. His hair caught in a wind, the wanderer gazes out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog. In the middle ground, several other ridges, perhaps not unlike the ones the wanderer himself stands upon, jut out from the mass. Through the wreaths of fog, forests of trees can be perceived atop these escarpments. In the far distance, faded mountains rise in the left, gently leveling off into lowland plains in the east. Beyond here, the pervading fog stretches out indefinitely, eventually commingling with the horizon and becoming indistinguishable from the cloud-filled sky.

The painting is composed of various elements from the Elbe Sandstone Mountains in Saxony and Bohemia, sketched in the field but in accordance with his usual practice, rearranged by Friedrich himself in the studio for the painting. In the background to the right is the Zirkelstein. The mountain in the background to the left could be either the Rosenberg or the Kaltenberg. The group of rocks in front of it represent the Gamrig near Rathen. The rocks on which the traveler stands are a group on the Kaiserkrone.

Friedrich’s greatest accomplishment was his ability to turn landscapes into a medium of physiological and spiritual biography. Here, he includes his own portrait within his landscape as a lay figure seen from behind — a device intended to invite the viewer to look at the world through the lens of the artist’s own personal perception.

It would not be an exaggeration to take this picture as the essence of the Romantic approach to art. Here, Friedrich has adapted the generic conventions of landscape painting to the demands of creative self-expression. Unwilling to have the artist serve as a mere “photographer” as it were of nature, Friedrich always took as his task the private and personal encounter of an individual with nature.

Indeed, Friedrich was captivated by the idea of encountering nature in solitude in deepest ravines, on the edge of the sea, or as here on the pinnacle of a mountain, which was about as far away from urban civilization as a European man could get. Indeed in his later paintings, Friedrich will continue to stress that the very idea of “self-expression” had to be associated with physical and spiritual isolation. The Romantics believed that any artist who wanted to explore his own emotions, had necessarily to stand outside of the throng of money-making, political gimmickry, and urban noise in order to assert and maintain their positions.

Carl Spitzweg (born on February 5, 1808 – died on September 23, 1885) was a German romanticist painter, especially of genre subjects. He is considered to be one of the most important artists of the Biedermeier era. The Biedermeier period refers to an era in Central Europe between 1815 and 1848, during which the middle class grew in number and arts appealed to common sensibilities. Biedermeier themes in visual arts reinforced feelings of security, Gemütlichkeit, traditional pieties and simplicity, eschewing political and social commentary during the epoch. Thus, the techniques, while classic in nature were of the utmost importance to reach a realistic rendering. Regarding the thematic, the technique was seen not only as a narrative medium to tell the past in anecdotal vignettes, but also to represent the present.

Spitzweg was born in Unterpfaffenhofen, the second of three sons of Franziska (née Schmutzer) and Simon Spitzweg. His father, a wealthy merchant, had Carl trained as a pharmacist. He attained his qualification from the University of Munich but, while recovering from an illness, he also took up painting. Spitzweg was self-taught as an artist, starting out by copying the works of Flemish masters. He contributed his first work to satiric magazines. Upon receiving an inheritance in 1833, he was able to dedicate himself to painting.

Later, Spitzweg visited European art centers in Prague, Venice, Paris, London, and Belgium studying the works of various artists and refining his technique and style. His later paintings and drawings are often humorous genre works. Many of his paintings depict sharply characterized eccentrics, for example The Bookworm (1850) and The Hypochondriac (c. 1865, in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich).

It’s more said his about paintings than his life, and his much-loved paintings are among the most targeted by thieves.

Germans rank Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet second only to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa among their all-time favorite paintings. It is small compared to most paintings and at only 36 X 45 cm has proven a fairly desirable target for thieves. The Poor Poet has been stolen twice. A daring day-time robbery in 1989 that involved speed and the ruse of a wheelchair-bound art patron left the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin without this famous painting and The Love Letter, another much loved work by Spitzweg. Both paintings remain unaccounted for.

In 1992, the German Federal Crime Department added 36 Spitzweg paintings to their list of missing works. Leaving the art world to assume that all 36 works had been recently stolen from their owners.

Spitzweg’s works are not so much admired for their technique or school of painting as much as they are for their subject matter. Spitzweg often included satire within each work and instead of creating just a portrait or a landscape, he created a humorous look into life in the middle class. One historical reference of the artist referred to him as a “genius who united in himself three qualities which seem to be contradictory – realism, fancy and humor.” Many in the art world liken viewing his paintings to wandering through an old German town of the 1840s.

Spitzweg lived alone in a small garret room perched above the beautiful Bavarian town of Rothenburg. He lived a fairly monastic lifestyle and he was often seen gazing down at the town below, perhaps seeking inspiration and details for a current or future work.

Perhaps it comes from living in a fairy-tale setting or the fact that he was a pharmacist prior to taking up painting and began painting for the sheer joy of it, Spitzweg’s works capture a bit of our humanity as they poke fun at life in general. All of this makes Spitzweg a much-loved painter and his works a source of joy and contentment.

 

 

 

 

Emmy Noether (March 23, 1882 – April 14, 1935) was a German mathematician known for her landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. She was named Amalie, but always called “Emmy”. She was the eldest of four children, but one of only two that survived childhood. Her brother, Fritz also made a career of mathematics. Her father was Max Noether, a noted mathematician of his time. Her mother was Ida Amalie, for whom Emmy was named.

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well.

Noether was a highly prolific mathematician, publishing groundbreaking papers, sometimes under a man’s name, in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory. And when she applied her equations to the universe around her, she discovered some of its basic rules, like how time and energy are related, and why it is, as the physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute put it, “that riding a bicycle is safe.”

As a child, Emmy Noether did not concentrate on mathematics. She spent her time in school studying languages, with a concentration on French and English. Her mother taught her the traditional skills of a young woman of that time. She learned to cook, clean, and play the clavier. At the time of her graduation from high school, she passed a test that allowed her to teach both French and English at schools for young women.

At the age of 18, Emmy Noether decided to take classes in mathematics at the University of Erlangen. Her brother, Fritz, was a student there, and her father was a professor of mathematics. Because she was a woman, the university refused to let Emmy Noether take classes They granted her permission to audit classes. She sat in on classes for two years, and then took the exam that would permit her to be a doctoral student in mathematics. She passed the test, and finally was a student in good standing at the University. After five more years of study, she was granted the second degree to a woman in the field of mathematics. The first graduated a year earlier.

Now that Emmy Noether had her doctorate in mathematics, she was ready to find a job teaching. The University of Erlangen would not hire her, as they had a policy against women professors. She decided to help her father at the Mathematics Institute in Erlangen. She began doing research there, and helped her father by teaching his classes when he was sick. Soon, she began to publish papers on her work.

During the ten years Emmy worked with her father, Germany became involved in World War I. Emmy was a pacifist at heart, and hated the war. She longed for a Germany that was not at war. In 1918, her wish was granted, as the war ended. The German monarchy was removed and the country became a republic. Noether, and all women in Germany, were given the right to vote for the first time. Even with the new rights granted to women, Noether was not paid for her work teaching.

Noether remained a leading member of the Göttingen mathematics department until 1933. Her students were sometimes called the “Noether boys”. In 1924, Dutch mathematician B. L. van der Waerden joined her circle and soon became the leading expositor of Noether’s ideas: her work was the foundation for the second volume of his influential 1931 textbook, Moderne Algebra. By the time of her plenary address at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, her algebraic acumen was recognized around the world.

Noether’s mathematical work has been divided into three “epochs”. In the first (1908–19), she made contributions to the theories of algebraic invariants and number fields. Her work on differential invariants in the calculus of variations, Noether’s theorem, has been called “one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics”. In the second epoch (1920–26), she began work that “changed the face of [abstract] algebra”. In her classic paper Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen (Theory of Ideals in Ring Domains, 1921) Noether developed the theory of ideals in commutative rings into a tool with wide-ranging applications. She made elegant use of the ascending chain condition, and objects satisfying it are named Noetherian in her honor. In the third epoch (1927–35), she published works on noncommutative algebras and hypercomplex numbers and united the representation theory of groups with the theory of modules and ideals. In addition to her own publications, Noether was generous with her ideas and is credited with several lines of research published by other mathematicians, even in fields far removed from her main work, such as algebraic topology.

In 1933, Germany’s Nazi government dismissed Jews from university positions, and Noether moved to the United States to take up a position at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She said she felt deeply appreciated as she never had been in Germany.

That didn’t last long, though. Only 18 months after her arrival in the United States, at the age of 53, Noether was operated on for an ovarian cyst, and died within days. There is no record of Noether ever marrying or having children.

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (born on February 3, 1809 – died on November 4, 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early romantic period. Felix Mendelssohn wrote Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream and founded the Leipzig Conservatory of Music.

A grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family. He was brought up without religion until the age of seven, when he was baptized as a Reformed Christian. Felix was recognized early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalize on his talent.

Mendelssohn enjoyed early success in Germany, and revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, notably with his performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829. He became well-received in his travels throughout Europe as a composer, conductor and soloist. His ten visits to Britain  – during which many of his major works were premiered – formed an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes set him apart from more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Charles-Valentin Alkan and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatoire, which he founded, became a bastion of this anti-radical outlook.

Mendelssohn’s parents were Jewish, but converted to Christianity before he, his brother and two sisters were born. When Mendelssohn was 2 years old, he moved to Berlin with his parents and siblings. In Berlin, the young Mendelssohn began taking piano lessons with Ludwig Berger. Mendelssohn also studied composition under composer K.F. Zelter as a child. In 1816, he broadened his lessons, studying under pianist Marie Bigot during an extended stay in Paris, France.

During his childhood, he composed a handful of operas and 11 symphonies. At just 9 years old, he made his public debut in Berlin.

In 1819, Felix Mendelssohn joined the Singakademie music academy and began composing non-stop. In 1820 alone, he wrote a violin sonata, two piano sonatas, multiple songs, a cantata, a brief opera and a male quartet. In 1821 his teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter introduced Mendelssohn to his friend and correspondent Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (then in his seventies), who was greatly impressed by the child, leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter.

In 1826, Mendelssohn produced one of his best known works, Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream. His “Wedding March” in C major, written in 1842, is one of the best known of the pieces from his suite of incidental music (Op. 61) to Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  It is one of the most frequently used wedding marches, generally being played on a church pipe organ.

At weddings in many Western countries, this piece is commonly used as a recessional, though frequently stripped of its episodes in this context. It is frequently teamed with the “Bridal Chorus” from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, or with Jeremiah Clarke’s “Prince of Denmark’s March”, both of which are often played for the entry of the bride.

The first time that Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” was used at a wedding was when Dorothy Carew wed Tom Daniel at St Peter’s Church, Tiverton, England, on 2 June 1847 when it was performed by organist Samuel Reay. However, it did not become popular at weddings until it was selected by Victoria, The Princess Royal for her marriage to Prince Frederick William of Prussia on 25 January 1858. The bride was the daughter of Queen Victoria, who loved Mendelssohn’s music and for whom Mendelssohn often played while on his visits to Britain. 

At Singakademie, Mendelssohn also became a conductor. In 1829, he conducted a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The performance’s success led to other great opportunities, including a chance to conduct the London Philharmonic Society that same year.

In 1836, a year after his father died, Mendelssohn met Cécile Jeanrenaud, a clergyman’s daughter, in Frankfurt. Mendelssohn was 10 years Jeanrenaud’s senior. She was just 16 when they got engaged. The couple married on March 28, 1837. Over the course of their marriage, they had five children.

The same year that he married, Mendelssohn composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor. From 1838 to 1844, he toiled away on his Violin Concerto in E Minor. Prior to the piece’s completion, Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory of Music and became its director. In so doing, he put Leipzig on the map as the musical center of Germany. After finishing Violin Concerto in E Minor, Mendelssohn conducted a string of concerts for the Philharmonic. In 1846 he presented his newly written Elijah at the Birmingham Festival.

In May 1847, Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny, who was a lifelong inspiration to him, died suddenly. Her death left him so devastated that he soon lost his own zest for life. His health, already compromised by his strenuous career, began to deteriorate rapidly. Six months later, on November 4, 1847, Felix Mendelssohn died of a ruptured blood vessel in Leipzig, Germany. He had recently returned from a brief visit to Switzerland, where he’d completed composition of his String Quartet in F Minor.

Although he was only 38 when he died, Mendelssohn managed to distinguish himself as one of the first significant Romantic composers of the 1800s.