Background
Julius August Bartels was born on August 17, 1899, in Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.
1955
Bartels was awarded the Emil Wiechert Medal of the German Geophysical Society.
1964
In 1964 Bartels was awarded (posthumously) the Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union.
the University of Gottingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
Bartels was educated at the University of Gottingen, graduating Ph.D. in 1923.
Julius Bartels was an eminent German geophysicist and statistician.
Julius Bartels, German geophysicist and statistician.
Julius Bartels, German geophysicist and statistician.
geophysicist scientist statistician
Julius August Bartels was born on August 17, 1899, in Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.
Bartels was educated at the University of Gottingen, graduating Ph.D. in 1923 and then working in close association with the distinguished geomagnetician Adolph Schmidt for four years.
Following his university training at Göttingen, where Bartels benefited from a galaxy of distinguished teachers, including Born, Debye, Franck, and Landau, he worked with Adolf Schmidt at the Potsdam Magnetic Observatory from 1923 to 1927. As early as 1928, he became Professor of Meteorology and Physics at the University of Forestry in Eberswalde.
Bartels was a head of the Meteorological Institute at the Fortliche Hochschule in Eberswalde from 1928 to 1941, professor of geophysics at the University of Berlin from 1941 to 1945, and professor of geophysics and director of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Gottingen from 1945 on. From 1956 he was also director of the Max Planck Institute of Aeronomy at Lindau and, from 1954 to 1957, president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy.
At the time Bartels began his research, the mathematical theory of statistics was emerging as a major scientific tool. Bartels saw how it could be used to improve the quality of inferences in important sections of geomagnetism. Accordingly, he developed rigorous statistical procedures that both served as a pattern in subsequent geomagnetic analyses and led to new results of much importance. He himself applied the procedures skillfully and fruitfully.
Bartels’ statistical analyses led him to make the first clear discrimination between the geomagnetic variations caused by wave and particle radiation from the sun, and from this to develop reliable measures, based on geomagnetic observations, of the two types of radiation. Some of the indexes he introduced in his treatment of geomagnetic variations came to be used internationally, e.g., a sensitive geomagnetic index of the influx of solar particles into the auroral region and his planetary indexes. His procedures further enabled Bartels to elucidate features of tides in the earth’s atmosphere that is caused by the moon’s gravitational attraction. In investigating twenty-seven-day variations in geomagnetic activity, which are connected with the sun’s rotation, he was led to postulate the existence in the sun of certain magnetically active regions (M regions), which astronomers later connected with the development of sunspots. He also showed that the sun’s surface is never wholly active or wholly quiet.
In 1933 Bartels signed the Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State.
Bartels was a member of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and of the Gauss Society of Göttingen.