Cemeteries of Munich

One of my goals is to visit the graves of famous physicists that happen to be buried in Munich. Usually because they lived in Munich (or died in Munich) and taught at the University of Munich (now called the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, LMU).

The first one I visited, two weeks ago, was the Alter Südfriedhof, just outside the old city walls near Sendlinger Tor. Buried there is Joseph Fraunhofer.

And also Georg Ohm.

Fraunhofer, of course, is one of the fathers of spectroscopy, and he was the first to discover the "Fraunhofer lines," absorption lines in the solar spectrum that allows us to determine the chemical makeup of the solar atmosphere.

Ohm is more famous. His law, Ohm's Law, is a description of the proportionality between current and voltage, and he was a professor at the Universität from 1852-1854. There is a nice statue of Ohm on Theresienstraße at the Technische Universität, TU.

Finally, last week, I visited the Waldfriedhof - the Forest Cemetery. Werner Heisenberg is buried there, the father of the uncertainty principle.

While he was never a professor here, he was a student. His advisor was another famous physicist, Arnold Sommerfeld, and Sommerfeld is buried in another Munich cemetery, the Nordfriedhof. I plan to visit that next, given that Ernst Mach (of Mach number fame) is buried in Nordfriedhof. Those pictures will be coming soon.

I have a special connection to Sommerfeld, as he is my academic great-grandfather. My PhD advisor, Burt Fried, did his graduate school at the University of Chicago under Gregor Wenzel. And Wenzel was also a student of Sommerfeld's. So I'm especially interested in Sommerfeld's grave.