Christa Jungnickel (11 April 1935 – 12 August 1990) was a German-American historian of science.

Life

Jungnickel was originally from Germany, one of three daughters of a German soldier who was lost in Russia during World War II. As a teenager, she emigrated with her family to the US; her mother, formerly an office worker, became a house cleaner in San Francisco. Jungnickel herself began work after high school as a typist and later an accountant for a stock broker, while studying part-time at the University of San Francisco. She eventually transferred to full-time study at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, working there with historian Jacqueline Strain. After graduating in 1969, she began graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, but transferred in 1972 to Johns Hopkins University, and completed her doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1978 with a dissertation concerning the Royal Saxon Academy of Sciences. Jungnickel's doctoral supervisor was

Russell McCormmach Russell Keith McCormmach (born 9 October 1933), the husband of the late Christa Jungnickel, is an American historian of physics. McCormmach grew up in Walla Walla, Washington and studied physics at Washington State College with bachelor's degree i ...

, whom she married. When Jungnickel fell ill of cancer in 1983, McCormmach left academia and they moved to

Eugene, Oregon Eugene ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Oregon. It is located at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, near the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette rivers, about east of the Oregon Coast. As of the 2020 United States Census, Eu ...

, where they remained until she died in 1990 of an unrelated heart condition.

Books

Jungnickel is best known for her two-volume work '' Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein'' (University of Chicago Press, 1986), which she coauthored with her husband

. It won the Pfizer Award in 1987, and was reprinted in a revised and shortened form as ''The Second Physicist: On the History of Theoretical Physics in Germany'' (Springer, 2017). With McCormmach, Jungnickel also wrote a biography of Henry Cavendish, the book ''Cavendish'' ( American Philosophical Society, 1996), updated as ''Cavendish: The Experimental Life'' (Bucknell University Press, 1999).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jungnickel, Christa 1935 births 1990 deaths American historians of science American women historians Stanford University alumni Johns Hopkins University alumni German emigrants to the United States 20th-century American women 20th-century American people