Johann Rudolf Wolf (7 July 1816 – 6 December 1893) was a
Swiss
Swiss may refer to:
* the adjectival form of Switzerland
* Swiss people
Places
* Swiss, Missouri
* Swiss, North Carolina
*Swiss, West Virginia
* Swiss, Wisconsin
Other uses
*Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports
*Swiss Internation ...
astronomer and
mathematician best known for his research on
sunspot
Sunspots are phenomena on the Sun's photosphere that appear as temporary spots that are darker than the surrounding areas. They are regions of reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic flux that inhibit convection. Sun ...
s.
Wolf was born in
Fällanden, near Zurich. He studied at the universities of Zurich, Vienna, and Berlin.
Encke was one of his teachers. Wolf became professor of astronomy at the
University of Bern in 1844 and director of the Bern Observatory in 1847. In 1855 he accepted a chair of astronomy at both the
University of Zurich and the
Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Wolf was greatly impressed by the discovery of the sunspot cycle by
Heinrich Schwabe and he not only carried out his own observations, but he collected all the available data on sunspot activity back as far as 1610 and calculated a period for the cycle of 11.1 years. In 1848 he devised a way of quantifying sunspot activity. The
Wolf number, as it is now called, remains in use. In 1852 Wolf was one of four people who discovered the link between the cycle and geomagnetic activity on Earth.
Around 1850, to study the laws of probability, Wolf performed a
Buffon's needle experiment, dropping a needle on a plate 5000 times to verify the value of
π, a precursor to the
Monte Carlo method.
References
Further reading
*
External links
HAO "Rudolf Wolf (1816–1893"Analysis of Wolf's dice databy
Edwin Jaynes
19th-century Swiss astronomers
1816 births
1893 deaths
Historians of astronomy
University of Zurich alumni
University of Zurich faculty
ETH Zurich faculty
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
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