Gustav Karsten

Gustav Karsten (1820 to 1900) was a German physicist, born in Berlin. He studied mathematics and sciences at Bonn and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1843 with a thesis on the dynamical theory of electricity, and his teachers at Berlin included Jakob Steiner, Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet and Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. He obtained his habilitation in 1845 and from 1847 to 1894 was a professor of physics and mineralogy at the University of Kiel, lecturing on experimental and theoretical physics, mineralogy, physical geography and meteorology. He served four times as rector and was the doctoral advisor of the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas. A founding member of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft in 1845, he sat from 1870 on the commission for the scientific research of the German seas and for a time edited the Fortschritte der Physik.