Hans Jacob Reissner, also known as Jacob Johannes Reissner (18 January 1874,

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

– 2 October 1967, Mt. Angel, Oregon), was a German

aeronautical engineer Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is sim ...

whose avocation was mathematical physics. During

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 ...

he was awarded the

Iron Cross The Iron Cross (german: link=no, Eisernes Kreuz, , abbreviated EK) was a military decoration in the Kingdom of Prussia, and later in the German Empire (1871–1918) and Nazi Germany (1933–1945). King Frederick William III of Prussia es ...

second class (for civilians) for his pioneering work on aircraft design.

Biography

Reissner was born into a wealthy Berlin family that benefited from an inheritance from his great-uncle on his mother's side. As a young engineering graduate, he spent a year in the U.S. working as a draftsman. After this year, he broadened his academic interests to include physics. As a young academic, he published mathematical papers on engineering problems. Before the first World War, Reissner designed the first successful all-metal aircraft, the Reissner Canard (or Ente) with both skin and structure made of metal. This was constructed with assistance from

Hugo Junkers Hugo Junkers (3 February 1859 – 3 February 1935) was a German aircraft engineer and aircraft designer who pioneered the design of all-metal airplanes and flying wings. His company, Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG (Junkers Aircraft and ...

who had previously shown little interest in aviation. Both were professors at the University of Aachen. The first flight was made on May 23, 1912 with Robert Gsell at the controls. During the Nazi regime Reissner was able to work in the aircraft industry although he did not have an

Aryan certificate In Nazi Germany, the Aryan certificate/passport (german: Ariernachweis) was a document which certified that a person was a member of the presumed Aryan race. Beginning in April 1933, it was required from all employees and officials in the publ ...

. In 1935 he lost his post at the Technical University of Berlin due to his Jewish ancestry, and in 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He taught at the

Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has prog ...

(1938–44) and the

Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn The New York University Tandon School of Engineering (commonly referred to as Tandon) is the engineering and applied sciences school of New York University. Tandon is the second oldest private engineering and technology school in the United Sta ...

(1944–54). Curiously, it was this engineer, rather than a physicist or mathematician, who first solved Einstein's equation for the metric of a charged point mass. His closed-form solution, rediscovered by several other physicists within the next few years, is now called the

Reissner–Nordström metric In physics and astronomy, the Reissner–Nordström metric is a static solution to the Einstein–Maxwell field equations, which corresponds to the gravitational field of a charged, non-rotating, spherically symmetric body of mass ''M''. T ...

Eric Reissner Max Erich (Eric) Reissner (January 5, 1913 – November 1, 1996) was a German-American civil engineer and mathematician, and Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was recipient of the Theodore von Karman Medal ...

(Max Erich Reissner, 1913–1996), his son, developed

Mindlin–Reissner plate theory The Uflyand-Mindlin theory of vibrating plates is an extension of Kirchhoff–Love plate theory that takes into account shear deformations through-the-thickness of a plate. The theory was proposed in 1948 by Yakov Solomonovich UflyandUflyand, Y ...

References

External links

Hans Reissner Papers
MSS 30
Special Collections & Archives
UC San Diego Library. {{DEFAULTSORT:Reissner, Hans Jacob Engineers from Berlin Illinois Institute of Technology faculty Junkers people 1874 births 1967 deaths American engineers Polytechnic Institute of New York University faculty Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States American Jews