Augustin Maior (22 August 1882 – 3 October 1963) was a Romanian physicist, educator and inventor.

Studies

Maior was born in

Reghin Reghin (; hu, Szászrégen, or ; german: (Sächsisch) Regen) is a city in Mureș County, Transylvania, central Romania, on the Mureș River. As of 2011, it had a population of 33,281.Rezultatele finale ale Recensământului din 2011: Locat ...

Transylvania Transylvania ( ro, Ardeal or ; hu, Erdély; german: Siebenbürgen) is a historical and cultural region in Central Europe, encompassing central Romania. To the east and south its natural border is the Carpathian Mountains, and to the west the Ap ...

(then ''Szászrégen'',

Kingdom of Hungary The Kingdom of Hungary was a monarchy in Central Europe that existed for nearly a millennium, from the Middle Ages into the 20th century. The Principality of Hungary emerged as a Christian kingdom upon the coronation of the first king Stephen ...

, part of

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

) on 21 August 1882. His parents, Teresa (a well-educated woman) and George (teacher and then director of the Romanian Primary School in Reghin) had five children: Olivia, Augustin, Julius, George and Ana. Maior's early years of schooling in Reghin were in German: his kindergarten, primary and secondary schooling were at the German Evangelical School. Then he attended the Piarist High School in Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureș, Romania) and Catholic High School in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

. In addition to a facility for learning foreign languages, he showed promise in physics and mathematics. He passed the Baccalaureate exam in 1900 and then until 1904 he attended the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute in Budapest. In 1905 he attended several postgraduate courses at renowned universities in Vienna, Munich and Göttingen, where he met many of the leading scientific personalities of the time, such as

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...

Hermann Minkowski Hermann Minkowski (; ; 22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich and Göttingen. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and used geometrical methods to solve problems in number t ...

Felix Klein Christian Felix Klein (; 25 April 1849 – 22 June 1925) was a German mathematician and mathematics educator, known for his work with group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and on the associations between geometry and group ...

Carl David Tolmé Runge Carl David Tolmé Runge (; 30 August 1856 – 3 January 1927) was a German mathematician, physicist, and spectroscopist. He was co-developer and co-eponym of the Runge–Kutta method (German pronunciation: ), in the field of what is today known a ...

Eduard Riecke Eduard Riecke (1 December 1845 – 11 June 1915) was a German experimental physicist. Riecke studied physics at the Polytechnic in Stuttgart, at the University of Tübingen and at the University of Göttingen under Wilhelm Weber and Friedrich ...

Ludwig Prandtl Ludwig Prandtl (4 February 1875 – 15 August 1953) was a German fluid dynamicist, physicist and aerospace scientist. He was a pioneer in the development of rigorous systematic mathematical analyses which he used for underlying the science of ...

Emil Wiechert Emil Johann Wiechert (26 December 1861 – 19 March 1928) was a German physicist and geophysicist who made many contributions to both fields, including presenting the first verifiable model of a layered structure of the Earth and being among the ...

and the younger physicists such as

Max Born Max Born (; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German 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 n ...

Max von Laue Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 – 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. In addition to his scientific endeavors with cont ...

and

Peter Debye Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Biography Early life Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, D ...

Multiple telephony

In November 1905, Maior was employed as an engineer in the Electricity Laboratory of the General Directorate of Posts in Budapest. In 1906 he managed to transmit five calls simultaneously on a single 15-km telephone line, without interference between them. His "Theoretical Foundations of Multiple Telephony" was published in 1907 in the "Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift" and then, in 1914, "The Use of High-Frequency Alternating Currents in Telegraphy, Telephony and for Power Transmission" was published in "The Electrician."

Return to Romania

After

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

and the

union of Transylvania with Romania The union of Transylvania with Romania was declared on by the assembly of the delegates of ethnic Romanians held in Alba Iulia. The Great Union Day (also called ''Unification Day''), celebrated on 1 December, is a national holiday in Romani ...

, Maior offered his expertise to the Romanian authorities, becoming director general of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones of Transylvania and Banat. Almost simultaneously, in July 1919, he was appointed professor at the University of Cluj and then director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Faculty of Technology. During 1929-1946 he served as dean of the faculty. He taught physics courses containing many modern ideas such as "Electricity and Magnetism" and "acoustics and optics," for which he published textbooks in various editions. Maior proved to be a visionary. In 1923 he invited

Hermann Oberth Hermann Julius Oberth (; 25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Ts ...

to defend his dissertation at the University of Cluj, after it had been rejected by the University of Heidelberg as "too utopian." He put his signature on the diploma of a man who later would be widely recognized as the father of modern interplanetary rocketry.

Distinctions

He was elected a member of the

Romanian Academy of Sciences The Romanian Academy of Sciences was an institution established in Romania by a group of 26 scientists, dissatisfied with the imperfect organization of the Scientific Section of the Romanian Academy, which was left in the background, with only 12 ...

on 21 December 1937. Maior founded the School of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cluj, maintaining permanent contact with the great ideas of that time and making outstanding contributions in the fields under development in Europe. These contributions were fully recognized in 1950, when

Nobel laureate The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make out ...

Louis de Broglie Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie (, also , or ; 15 August 1892 – 19 March 1987) was a French physicist and aristocrat who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave na ...

presented, at the Academy of Paris, a work of Maior called "Gravitational Fields and Magnetism." It was one of the last happy moments of Maior's life, which became increasingly tumultuous after 1947. In recognition of his contribution to the development of education and research in modern physics, the physics council of the Faculty of the University of Cluj decided in March 1995 to name one of its auditoriums "The Augustin Maior Amphitheatre." Also as an act of gratitude and respect, at the former "No.5 Reghin school," the school at which he began his education, named their gymnasium on 21 March 1994 "Augustin Maior State Gymnasium." On 7 July 2004 the Cluj-Napoca City Hall put a memorial plaque on his childhood home, No. 9 Str. Octavian Goga. The Technical Communications College of Cluj-Napoca also bears his name. In 2012, Maior was posthumously elected a member of the

Romanian Academy The Romanian Academy ( ro, Academia Română ) is a cultural forum founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 1866. It covers the scientific, artistic and literary domains. The academy has 181 active members who are elected for life. According to its byl ...

.List of posthumously-elected Members of the Romanian Academy
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References

External links

Website of the State Gymnasium Augustin Maior
1: http://www2.rosa.ro/index.php/en/rosa-home/history-menu/126-hermann-oberth {{DEFAULTSORT:Maior, Augustin 1882 births 1963 deaths Romanian physicists Romanian Austro-Hungarians People from Reghin Members of the Romanian Academy elected posthumously Members of the Romanian Academy of Sciences Romanian university and college faculty deans Babeș-Bolyai University faculty