Emil Cohn

Emil Georg Cohn (1854 to 1944) was a German physicist, born in Neustrelitz, Mecklenburg, the son of a lawyer. At seventeen he began to study jurisprudence at the University of Leipzig, but at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Strasbourg he turned to physics and graduated at Strasbourg in 1879. From 1881 to 1884 he was an assistant of August Kundt at the physical institute, habilitated in theoretical physics in 1884, and was a faculty member of the University of Strasbourg until 1918. He dealt with experimental physics at first and then turned completely to theoretical physics, becoming one of the most respectable experts in theoretical electrodynamics at the start of the twentieth century. Unsatisfied with the Lorentzian theory of electrodynamics for moving bodies, he proposed an independent theory based on a modification of the Maxwell field equations, which was superseded after 1905. Expelled from Strasbourg in December 1918, he was a professor at Rostock from 1919, lectured at Freiburg from 1920, retired in Heidelberg in 1935 and died in Switzerland in 1944.