Wilhelm Anderson facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Wilhelm Anderson
Wilhelm Anderson in Tartu, c. 1930
Born	Wilhelm Robert Karl Anderson 28 October [O.S. 16 October] 1880 Minsk, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	March 26, 1940(1940-03-26) (aged 59) Meseritz-Obrawalde, Gau Mark Brandenburg, Deutsches Reich (present-day Międzyrzecz, Lubusz Voivodeship, Poland)
Nationality	Russian, Estonian, German
Alma mater	University of Kazan University of Tartu
Known for	Work on the white dwarf mass limit Stoner-Anderson equation
Scientific career
Fields	Astrophysics Astronomy
Institutions	University of Tartu
Thesis	Die physikalische Natur der Sonnenkorona

Wilhelm Robert Karl Anderson (born October 28, 1880 – died March 26, 1940) was a scientist from Russia and Estonia. He was an astrophysicist, which means he studied space and the physics of stars. He was especially interested in how stars are built.

Early Life and Education

Wilhelm Anderson was born in Minsk, a city that is now in Belarus. He came from a family of Baltic Germans. His younger brothers also became famous. Oskar Anderson was a well-known mathematician, and Walter Anderson studied folk stories and traditions.

Wilhelm spent some of his childhood in Kazan, a city in Russia. His father, Nikolai Anderson, was a university professor there. He taught about Finno-Ugric languages, which are spoken in parts of Europe and Asia.

Wilhelm Anderson went to the University of Kazan. He studied mathematics and science and finished his degree in 1909.

Career and Research

After university, Wilhelm Anderson worked as a physics teacher. He taught in the city of Samara and later in Minsk. In 1920, he moved to Tartu, a city in Estonia, with his brother Walter.

At the University of Tartu, he continued his studies. He earned a master's degree in Astronomy in 1923. Then, in 1927, he completed his doctorate degree. He became an assistant professor at the university in 1936.

Anderson is best known for his important work on white dwarf stars. These are very dense, small stars that are at the end of their lives. He studied how much mass a white dwarf star could have. His work built on earlier ideas by another scientist named Edmund Stoner.

Wilhelm Anderson and Edmund Stoner worked together through letters. Their ideas led to something called the Stoner-Anderson equation. This equation helps explain the state of matter inside these stars. Later, another scientist, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, improved these ideas even further. Today, the maximum mass a white dwarf can have is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit.

Sadly, Wilhelm Anderson became unwell in early 1939 and could no longer work. In 1940, he moved to Germany and passed away shortly after.

Selected Works

Wilhelm Anderson wrote many scientific papers during his career. Here are a few examples of his important work:

• About the possibility of cosmic dust in the Sun's corona. This paper was published in a physics journal in Berlin in 1924.
• The physical nature of the Sun's corona. This was his PhD thesis, published in six parts between 1925 and 1927.
• Ordinary matter and radiant energy as different "phases" of the same basic substance. This paper was published in 1929.
• About the limit density of matter and energy. Another paper from 1929.

See also

• Ralph H. Fowler
• Ernst Öpik
• Yakov Frenkel