Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller

Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller (1809 to 1875) was a German physicist, born in Kassel. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Bonn, where one of his instructors was Julius Plücker, and continued at the University of Giessen as a student of Justus von Liebig. After teaching at the Darmstadt gymnasium and at the Realschule in Giessen, he was appointed in 1844 professor of physics and technology at the University of Freiburg, a position he kept until his death in 1875. He researched optics, galvanism and magnetism as well as the radiation of light and heat, and from 1846 he analysed the Fraunhofer lines. His principal work, the Lehrbuch der Physik und Meteorologie of 1842, began as a version of Claude Pouillet's physics text, reached a seventh edition by 1868 and was later enlarged by Leopold Pfaundler.