Erwin Fues - Education and Career

Education and Career

During the period 1912 to 1914, Fues studied at the University of Berlin and then the University of Munich. He served in the military 1914 to circa 1915, and then attended the University of Tübingen from 1916 to 1918. During 1918, he became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld, and he received the doctor rerum naturalium from the University of Munich in 1920. From 1922 he did postgraduate work at the Stuttgart Technische Hochschule, under Paul Peter Ewald, also a former student of Arnold Sommerfeld, and he completed his Habilitation in 1924. At Stuttgart he served as a Privatdozent and assistant to Ewald until 1929, during which time he worked on atomic and molecular structure and spectroscopy based on the Sommerfeld-Bohr theory. During his tenure under Ewald, he was absent during the period 1925 to 1927, when, as an International Education Board fellow, he was first an assistant to Erwin Schrödinger at the University of Zurich, and then a research assistant at the University of Copenhagen at Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics. At that time three major centers for the development of quantum mechanics were the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Munich, under Arnold Sommerfeld, the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen, under Max Born, and the Institute of Theoretical Physics, under Niels Bohr.

From 1929 to 1934, he served as ordinarius professor at the Hanover Technische Hochschule. From 1934 to 1943, he served as ordinarius professor jointly at the University of Breslau and the Breslau Technische Hochschule, after which, he went to the Vienna Technische Universität, where he remained until 1947. In that year, he went back to the Stuttgart Technische Hochschule, where the Institute for Theoretical and Applied Physics (Institut für Theoretische und Angewandte Physik) had been formed with two chairs. Fues became ordinarius professor for theoretical physics as well as director of the institute; the other joint director was Ulrich Dehlinger. The institute followed the tradition of both Sommerfeld and Ewald in carrying on with both theoretical and experimental research and teaching.

After the death of Sommerfeld in 1951, Fues edited and supplemented multiple editions of two volumes of Sommerfeld’s six-volume Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik.

In his career, Fues made contributions to theoretical physics, especially in atomic structure, quantum wave mechanics, and solid-state physics. In 1960, Hermann Haken took over from Fues at the Institute for Theoretical and Applied Physics.