Rudolf Kohlrausch

Rudolf Hermann Arndt Kohlrausch (1809 to 1858) was a German physicist, born in Göttingen as the son of the Hanoverian director general of schools. He taught mathematics and physics at schools in Lüneburg, Rinteln, Kassel and Marburg, became an associate professor at the University of Marburg in 1853, and four years later a full professor of physics at the University of Erlangen. In 1854 he introduced relaxation phenomena and used the stretched exponential function to explain how a Leyden jar discharges. With Wilhelm Weber he showed in an experiment of 1855, published in 1857, that the ratio of electrostatic to electromagnetic units gives a number close to the speed of light, a finding that was instrumental toward Maxwell's conjecture that light is an electromagnetic wave. He was the father of the physicist Friedrich Kohlrausch.