Woldemar Voigt

Woldemar Voigt was a German mathematician and physicist, born in Leipzig in 1850 and a student of Franz Ernst Neumann. He taught at the Georg August University of Gottingen, where he eventually headed the Mathematical Physics Department until Peter Debye succeeded him in 1914. He worked on crystal physics, thermodynamics and electro-optics, and his main work was the Lehrbuch der Kristallphysik of 1910. He discovered the Voigt effect in 1898, introduced the word tensor in its current meaning in the same year, and in 1887 formulated a transformation between a rest frame and a moving frame, a precursor of the Lorentz transformation. He was also an amateur musician and a recognised Bach expert.