Background
Walter Gordon was born on August 3, 1893, in Apolda, Germany. He was the son of businessman Arnold Gordon and his wife Bianca Gordon. The family moved to Switzerland in his early years.
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
In 1915 Walter began his studies of mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University of Berlin). He received his doctoral degree in 1921.
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
In 1915 Walter began his studies of mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University of Berlin). He received his doctoral degree in 1921.
Walter Gordon was born on August 3, 1893, in Apolda, Germany. He was the son of businessman Arnold Gordon and his wife Bianca Gordon. The family moved to Switzerland in his early years.
In 1900 Walter attended school in St. Gallen and in 1915 he began his studies of mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University of Berlin). He received his doctoral degree in 1921.
In 1922, while still at the University of Berlin, Gordon became the assistant of Max von Laue. He remained there until 1929, when he became Privatdozent - and later associate professor - at the University of Hamburg. He lost his position there, like other professors of Jewish origin, in the spring of 1933. He became a member of the Institute of Mathematical Physics at the University of Stockholm in the fall of the same year. Through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and contributions from organizations for refugee aid and some private sources, he and his wife obtained a meager living. Poor conditions for science at the University of Stockholm, together with a general lack of understanding of existing German political conditions, prevented his obtaining a regular position.
Gordon’s thorough mathematical foundation led him to rigorous solutions of important problems of quantum theory. He did not produce many writings, but his publications are of high quality. Some of his results were obtained by others about the same time, because of the intense development of quantum mechanics during the 1920’s.
Soon after Erwin Schrödinger’s publication of his first papers on wave mechanics in 1926, Gordon made several important contributions to the relativistic generalization of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics: the current-density vector of the scalar wave equation, and the quantitative formula for the Compton effect. That these results were not applicable to the electron - as was generally believed at that time - but to particles obeying Bose statistics, which, however, were discovered later, does not detract from the quality of this work. Soon after the appearance of Dirac’s theory of the electron early in 1928, Gordon published two papers containing important contributions to this theory.
In the first paper, he gave a rigorous treatment of both states of the Dirac equation in a Coulomb field. In his next paper Gordon showed that the current density vector, given by Dirac, can be split into two parts, one being formally equal to the one he himself had derived for the scalar equation, while the other is connected with the spin of the electron. In his last paper, presented at the Congress of Scandinavian Mathematicians at Stockholm in 1934, he returned to a similar but more general problem, the possible states of a Schrödinger type wave equation in a multidimensional space, applying it to the probability of a quantity given as a function of the momenta and the coordinates and ending the paper with establishment of the integral equation for the states in a Coulomb field as functions of the momenta.
During almost all of his stay in Sweden, Gordon participated eagerly in the seminars at the Institute of Mathematical Physics. He also gave lectures, among them a valuable course in group theory.
But Gordon’s forced exile, taking him from the congenial and inspiring circle at the Hamburg Institute of Physics, and the uncertainty of his future brought an end to his creative powers. Early in 1937, his health declined, and inoperable stomach cancer was diagnosed. Good medical treatment and the care of his wife enabled him to live a reasonably normal life until the last months of 1940.
Walter Gordon was a prominent theoretical physicist. Together with Oskar Klein he proposed the Klein-Gordon equation to describe quantum particles in the framework of relativity. Another important contribution by Gordon was to the theory of the Dirac equation, where he introduced the Gordon decomposition of the current into its center of mass and spin contributions.
Gordon always eagerly participated in the seminars, to which his erudition, not merely in physics and mathematics, and his caustic but friendly humor gave a characteristic touch.
Gordon married a Hamburg woman, Gertrud Lobbenberg, in 1932.
