Oskar Klein

Oskar Klein
Oskar Benjamin Klein (1894–1977). Photograph taken at the Göttingen Bohr-Festspiele, June 1922.
Born	(1894-09-15)15 September 1894 Mörby, Sweden
Died	5 February 1977(1977-02-05) (aged 82) Stockholm, Sweden
Nationality	Swedish
Alma mater	Nobel Institute University College of Stockholm
Known for	Kaluza–Klein theory Klein–Gordon equation Rydberg–Klein–Rees method Klein–Nishina formula Klein paradox Alfvén–Klein cosmology
Awards	Björkénska priset (1937) Max Planck Medal, 1959
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	Copenhagen University of Michigan Lund University University College of Stockholm
Doctoral students	David M. Dennison
Signature

Oskar Benjamin Klein (Swedish: [ˈklajn]; 15 September 1894 – 5 February 1977) was a Swedish theoretical physicist.

Biography

Oskar Klein's tomb at Judiska norra begravningsplatsen in Solna (grey stone to the right).

Klein was born in Danderyd outside Stockholm, son of the chief rabbi of Stockholm, Gottlieb Klein from Humenné in Kingdom of Hungary, now Slovakia and Antonie (Toni) Levy. He became a student of Svante Arrhenius at the Nobel Institute at a young age and was on the way to Jean-Baptiste Perrin in France when World War I broke out and he was drafted into the military.

From 1917, he worked a few years with Niels Bohr in the University of Copenhagen and received his doctoral degree at the University College of Stockholm (now Stockholm University) in 1921. In 1923, he received a professorship at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and moved there with his recently wedded wife, Gerda Koch from Denmark. Klein returned to Copenhagen in 1925, spent some time with Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden, then became docent at Lund University in 1926 and in 1930 accepted the offer of the professorial chair in physics at the Stockholm University College, which had previously been held by Erik Ivar Fredholm until his death in 1927. Klein was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1959. He retired as professor emeritus in 1962.

Klein is credited for inventing the idea, part of Kaluza–Klein theory, that extra dimensions may be physically real but curled up and very small, an idea essential to string theory / M-theory.

In 1938, he proposed a boson-exchange model for charge-charging weak interactions (radioactive decay), a few years after a similar proposal by Hideki Yukawa. His model was based on a local isotropic gauge symmetry and anticipated the later successful theory of Yang-Mills.

The Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture, held annually at the University of Stockholm, has been named after him. The Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics in Stockholm, Sweden is also in his honor.

Oskar Klein is the grandfather of Helle Klein.

External links

• Oskar Kline; The Atomicity of Electricity as a Quantum Theory Law, Nature 1926, 118 (516) - doi = "10.1038/118516a0",
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Oskar Klein", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews