Johann Jakob Balmer

Johann Jakob Balmer was a Swiss mathematician best known for his work in physics, the Balmer series of the hydrogen atom. He was born in Lausen in 1825, the eldest son of a chief justice of the same name, and excelled at mathematics at school. He studied at the University of Karlsruhe and the University of Berlin and took his doctorate at the University of Basel in 1849 with a dissertation on the cycloid. He then spent his whole life in Basel, teaching at a school for girls and lecturing at the university. In 1885, at the age of sixty and at the suggestion of Eduard Hagenbach, he used Angstrom measurements to find an empirical formula for the wavelengths of the visible hydrogen lines.