scholarly journals Obituary notices of fellows deceased

1905 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 19-380

Carl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart was born in the ancient university town of Helmstedt, on the 7th October, 1822, and died at Leipzig in his 76th year on February 6, 1898. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1877. Leuckart was the nephew of a celebrated but less distinguished zoologist, Frederick Sigismund Leuckart, who does not appear to have had any share in directing the tastes of his younger relative.

1954 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-200 ◽  

Otto Meyerhof was born on 12 April 1884 in Berlin and died in Philadelphia on 6 October 1951 at the age of 67; he was the son of Felix Meyerhof, who was born in 1849 at Hildesheim, and Bettina Meyerhof, nee May, born in 1862 in Hamburg; both his father and grandfather had been in business. An elder sister and two younger brothers died long before him. In 1923 he shared the Nobel prize for Physiology (for 1922) with A. V. Hill. He received an Hon. D.C.L. in 1926 from the University of Edinburgh, was a Foreign Member (1937) of the Royal Society of London, an Hon. Member of the Harvey Society and of Sigma XI. In 1944 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. Otto Meyerhof went through his school life up to the age of 14 without delay, but there is no record that he was then brilliant. When he was 16 he developed some kidney trouble, which caused a long period of rest in bed. This period of seclusion seems to have been responsible for a great mental and artistic development. Reading constantly he matured perceptibly, and in the autumn of 1900 was sent to Egypt on the doctor’s advice for recuperation.


1897 ◽  
Vol 60 (359-367) ◽  
Keyword(s):  

Hermann Kopp, who was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1888, and who died in Heidelberg on February 20, 1892, was born on October 30, 1817, at Hanau, where his father, Johann Heinrich Kopp, practised with some distinction as a physi­cian.


1956 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 237-247 ◽  

Richard Pfeiffer, one of the pioneers of bacteriology and an assistant of Robert Koch, was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1928 at the age of 70. Twenty-seven years later inquiry revealed that he was still alive in 1945 behind the Iron Curtain, but that since then all trace of him had been lost. It is now known that he died on 15 September 1945 aged 87 years. Richard Pfeiffer was born on 27 March 1858 at Zduny, Posen, the eldest son of Otto Pfeiffer, a clergyman, and received his early education at Schweidnitz whither the family had removed. He passed out of the Gymnasium at the age of 17. He always had the ambition to study the natural sciences and medicine, but the family resources made a University career impossible. He was, however, fortunate in being accepted as a pupil in the exclusive ‘Pepiniere’ (afterwards the Kaiser Wilhelm Akademie). The purpose of this institution was to train boys to enter the Army Medical Service, and a number of its pupils had become leading bacteriologists. Education at the ‘Pepiniere’ was therefore a distinct step towards a career in medical science.


It is right that at our Anniversary Meeting we should have in mind the losses that our Fellowship has suffered during the year that has just passed. We have to deplore to-day the deaths of no less than four of our distinguished Foreign Members, together with fourteen Fellows of the Society. Albert Auguste Toussaint Brachet, of Brussels, was a distinguished leader in the science of embryology. He was one of the pupils of van Beneden and carried on traditions derived from that master of the subject, though on lines of his own. His earlier work dealt chiefly with the morphological facts of development, but he later made important contributions to experimental embryology. His researches were specially concerned with the early stages of development in the amphibia, and his work threw important light upon the problem of localisation in the developing egg. His later interests and contributions were concerned with what may be described as the physiological factors and conditions which initiate development. He was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1928.


WHILE collecting information for the Royal Society Biographical Memoir of Professor Otto Warburg, Foreign Member R.S., I came across two unpublished letters of W. C. Rontgen addressed to Otto Warburg’s father, Emil Warburg, at that time Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin. The letters are in the possession of Dr Peter G. Meyer-Viol, of Maastricht, Holland, a grandson of Emil Warburg. Both letters are concerned with the discovery of the X-rays. The first was written four weeks after the first publication on this subject, the second fifteen months later.


1776 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 523-529 ◽  

The travels in which I have been employed, by order of our empress, since the year 1768, have interrupted the correspondence I had the pleasure to entertain with some of the Fellows of the Royal Society of London, particularly the worthy Mr. Collinson; and as this ingenious man, in the mean time, has left this world, I make so free as to address myself to you directly, for the leave of communicating from time to time, to the Royal Society, such observation or papers, which I am not bound to deliver to the Academy here. I would have before this observed that duty, to which the honour of being a foreign member of the Royal Society obliges me, had not the distance in which I have lived thees seven years, mostly out of Europe, and the troublesome manner of travelling in these countries, together with the distractions and duties of my employment, rendered it impossible.


1944 ◽  
Vol 4 (13) ◽  
pp. 483-490 ◽  

Henri Léon Lebesgue was born in 1875 and died in 1941. He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and his first post appears to have been that of maitre des conferences at Rennes, which he held until 1906. He then moved to Poitiers, where he was described first as ‘charge de cours a la faculte des Sciences’ and later as professor. In or about 1912 he was called to Paris as maitre des conferences and he afterwards became professor at the College de France. He was elected to the Academie des Sciences in 1922. He was made an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society in 1924, and a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1934. Towards the close of the last century, the development of mathematical analysis may be said broadly to have reached the stage at which a piece of work wherein only continuous functions were encountered could be carried through. For example, the Riemann integral solved the problem of finding a function having a given derivative if the derivative was continuous. Again, everything was known about the length of a curve and its expression as an integral if it had a continuously turning tangent. Artificial and unaesthetic restrictions had repeatedly to be made to keep out discontinuous functions. Jordan, in the preface to his Cours d'Analyse (2nd edition, 1893), wrote: ‘Certains points presentent encore quelque obscurite. Pour en citer un exemple, nous n’avons pu arriver a definir d’une maniere satisfaisante l’aire d’une surface gauche, que dans le cas ou la surface a un plan tangent, variant suivant une loi continue’. In 1898 vital steps were taken by Baire and by Borel. The thése of Baire was a systematic and penetrating discussion of discontinuous functions. And Borel in the small compass of four pages of his tract, Leçons sur la théorie des fonctions , propounded his theory of measure, fundamentally more powerful than Jordan’s theory of content in being additive for an enumerable infinity of sets. All was ready for the rapid advances of the next decade which made the theory of real functions into a satisfying whole; in this transformation the leading part was played by Lebesgue.


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