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Max Abraham (March 26 1875 – November 16 1922) was a German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
 physicist
Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many Physics#Major fields of physics spanning all length scales: from atom particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole ....
. Abraham was born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk
Gdansk

Gdansk is the city at the centre of the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Poland. It is Poland's principal seaport as well as the capital of the Pomeranian Voivodeship....
 in Poland
Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe. Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian Enclave and exclave, to the north....
) to a family of Jewish merchant
Merchant

Merchants function as professionals who deal with trade, dealing in commodities that they do not produce themselves, in order to produce profit....
s. Attending the University of Berlin, he studied under Max Planck
Max Planck

Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck, better known as Max Planck was a Germany physicist. He is considered to be the founder of the Quantum mechanics, and one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century....
. He graduated in 1897. For the next three years, Abraham worked as Planck's assistant.

From 1900 to 1909, Abraham worked at Göttingen
Göttingen

G?ttingen is a college town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the Capital of the district of G?ttingen . The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686....
 as a privatdozent
Privatdozent

Private docent is a title conferred in some European university systems, especially in German language-speaking countries, for someone who pursues an academic career and holds all formal qualifications to become a tenured university professor....
, an unpaid lecturing position.

Abraham developed his theory of the electron
Electron

The electron is a subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. It has elementary particle and is believed to be a point particle....
 in 1902, in which he hypothesized that the electron was a perfect sphere with a charge divided evenly around its surface.






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Max Abraham (March 26 1875 – November 16 1922) was a German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
 physicist
Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many Physics#Major fields of physics spanning all length scales: from atom particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole ....
. Abraham was born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk
Gdansk

Gdansk is the city at the centre of the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Poland. It is Poland's principal seaport as well as the capital of the Pomeranian Voivodeship....
 in Poland
Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe. Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian Enclave and exclave, to the north....
) to a family of Jewish merchant
Merchant

Merchants function as professionals who deal with trade, dealing in commodities that they do not produce themselves, in order to produce profit....
s. Attending the University of Berlin, he studied under Max Planck
Max Planck

Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck, better known as Max Planck was a Germany physicist. He is considered to be the founder of the Quantum mechanics, and one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century....
. He graduated in 1897. For the next three years, Abraham worked as Planck's assistant.

From 1900 to 1909, Abraham worked at Göttingen
Göttingen

G?ttingen is a college town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the Capital of the district of G?ttingen . The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686....
 as a privatdozent
Privatdozent

Private docent is a title conferred in some European university systems, especially in German language-speaking countries, for someone who pursues an academic career and holds all formal qualifications to become a tenured university professor....
, an unpaid lecturing position.

Abraham developed his theory of the electron
Electron

The electron is a subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. It has elementary particle and is believed to be a point particle....
 in 1902, in which he hypothesized that the electron was a perfect sphere with a charge divided evenly around its surface. Hendrik Lorentz
Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Netherlands physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect....
 (1899, 1904) and Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a Germany-born theoretical physics. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass?energy equivalence, expressed by the equation E = mc2....
 (1905) developed a different theory which became more widely accepted; nevertheless, Abraham never gave up believing that his views were correct, since in his eyes they were based on "common sense
Common sense

For the pamphlet by Thomas Paine see Common Sense . For use with Wikipedia see WP:COMMON SENSE.Common sense , based on a strict interpretation of the term, consists of what people in common would agree on: that which they "sense" as their common natural understanding....
".

In 1909 Abraham travelled to the United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 to accept a position at the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a public university research university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the oldest and largest campus in the University of Illinois system....
, but ended up returning to Göttingen after a few months. He was later invited to Italy
Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
 by Tullio Levi-Civita
Tullio Levi-Civita

Tullio Levi-Civita was an Italy mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus and its applications to the theory of relativity but who also made significant contributions in other areas....
, and found work as the professor of rational mechanics at the Politecnico di Milano university until 1914.

When World War I
World War I

World War I, or the First World War , was a global military conflict which involved the Great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War I and the Central Powers....
 started, Abraham was forced to return to Germany. During this time he worked on the theory of radio transmission. After the war, he still was not allowed back into Milan, so until 1921 he worked at Stuttgart
Stuttgart

Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-W?rttemberg in southern Germany. The list of cities in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 590,429 while the metropolitan area referred to as Stuttgart Region has a population of 2.7 million ....
 as the professor of physics
Physics

Physics is the natural science which examines basic concepts such as energy, force, and spacetime and all that derives from these, such as mass, charge, matter and its Motion ....
 at Technische Hochschule
Technische Hochschule

Technische Hochschule is, what an Institute of Technology used to be called in German language speaking countries, before most of them changed their name to Technische Universit?t in the 1970s....
.

After his work at Stuttgart, Abraham accepted the position of chair in Aachen
Aachen

is a historic spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is the westernmost city of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, 65 km west of Cologne....
; however, before he started his work there he was diagnosed with a brain tumor
Brain tumor

A brain tumor is an abnormal growth of cells within the brain or inside the skull, which can be cancerous or non-cancerous .It is defined as any cranium tumor created by abnormal and uncontrolled Mitosis, normally either in the brain itself , in the cranial nerves , in the brain envelopes , skull, pituitary and pineal gland, or spread from...
. He died on November 16, 1922 in Munich, Germany.

After his death, Max Born
Max Born

Max Born was a Germany physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s....
 and Max von Laue
Max von Laue

Max Theodor Felix von Laue was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals....
 wrote about him in an obituary: He loved his absolute aether, his field equations, his rigid electron just as a youth loves his first flame, whose memory no later experience can extinguish.



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