Prof. Yang's Homepage

Announcement:

• The lecture slides of Spring 2016 can be found here.

Textbook & Reference

Question?

• Email to the professor: shangda@ee.nthu.edu.tw

• Knock the door: Delta 810 (台達館810)

Hall of Fame

James Clerk Maxwell (1831~1879): Scottish mathematician and physicist. He modified and integrated mathematical formulas of previous works on electricity and magnetism into a coupled set of differential equations (Maxwell's equations, originally 20 equations in 20 variables) in 1864. His equations predicts the existence of electromagnetic waves propagating at the speed of light. In kinetic theory of gases, the Maxwell's distribution gives the fraction of gas molecules moving at a specified velocity at any given temperature (1866). He is also credited with the first color photograph (1861).

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821~1894): German physiologist and physicist. He proposed the principle of conservation of energy while studying muscle metabolism (1847). He predicted electromagnetic radiation from Maxwell's equations (experimentally demonstrated by his student Hertz in 1886), and now the wave equation carries his name.

Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618~1663): Italian mathematician and physicist taught at the Jesuit college in Bologna. He was the first to make accurate observations on the diffraction of light, and coined the term "diffraction".

Thomas Young (1773~1829): English polymath. He received the doctorate of physics from Göttingen, Germany (1796), and served as a physician in London (1799). He was a professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution (1801-3). He conducted a series of experiments to establish the wave theory of light in early 1800s.

Wilhelm von Haidinger (1795~1871): Austrian mineralogist. He was the director of Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna (1849-67). He was the first to observe the slight polarization dependence of the human eye.

Albert Abraham Michelson (1852~1931): The first American to receive the Nobel prize in sciences (1907) "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid".

Born in a Jewish family in Prussia, he immigrated to the US at the age of two. He graduated from the US Naval Academy (1869), and served in the US Navy for 12 years. He was professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland (1883-9), during which he conducted the famous Michelson-Morley experiment (in collaboration with Edward Morley of Western Reserve College) using his improved interferometer to rule out the existence of  the aether (1887). He headed the newly founded department of physics, University of Chicago since 1892.

Ludwig Louis Albert Zehnder (1854~1949): Swiss physicist. He was a student of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, and produced the first human skeleton picture by x-rays He co-invented the Mach-Zehnder interferometer with Austrian physicist Ludwig Mach.

Charles Fabry (1867~1945): French physicist. In collaboration with his colleague Alfred Pérot at University of Marseille, they introduced the Fabry-Pérot interferometer (1897). He was professor of physics at University of Marseille (1894-1920), Sorbonne, École Polytechnique (1926), and the first director of the Institut d'Optique. He also discovered (with Henry Buisson) the Earth's ozone layer (1913).

Alfred Perot (1863~1925): French physicist. He switched his professorship at University of Marseille from physics to industrial electricity in 1894 (Fabry took his vacancy of physics). He was responsible for design and building of the Fabry-Pérot interferometer, while Charles Fabry did the theoretical work.

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787~1826): German optician. The far-field diffraction theory is named in honor of him, though he was not involved with its development. He was an orphan at the age of 11, and an apprentice to a harsh glassmaker in Bavaria, Germany. Because of an accident (he was buried in the rubble of the collapsed workshop), he could resume his education under the sponsorship of Prince Maximilian of Bavaria (1801). He joined (1806), and later directed (1818) the Optical Institute (a glassmaking firm). Because of the fine optical instruments he had developed, Bavaria overtook England as the center of the optics industry.

Christiaan Huygens (1629~1695): Dutch mathematician and physicist. He served at the French Academy of Sciences (1666-81), during which he proposed (1678), and latter published (1690), the wave theory of light. He also invented and patented the pendulum clock (1657).

Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788~1827): French engineer. He still could not read at age of 8. He served as an engineer, commissioner of lighthouse (1819). His work extended the wave theory of light to a large class of phenomena. He showed that polarization could be explained only if light is entirely transversal wave (1821), and invented the Fresnel lens widely used in lighthouses (1823).

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824~1887): German physicist. He formulated the circuit laws (Kirchhoff's voltage and current laws) as a seminar exercise while still a student (1845). He is also known for the three laws of spectroscopy, describing the spectral composition of light emitted by incandescent objects.

Alfred Cornu (1841~1902): French physicist. He was professor of experimental physics at École Polytechnique (1867-1902), and president of French Academy of Sciences (1896). He worked on redetermination of the speed of light with greatly improved accuracy.

Joseph Fourier (1768~1830): French mathematician and physicist. He was orphaned at age 8. He took a military lectureship on mathematics, and succeeded Lagrange at the École Polytechnique. He joined the Napoleon expedition to Egypt (1798-1801), during which he was made secretary of the Institut d'Egypte. He returned France and was appointed Prefect (governor) in Grenoble by Napoleon. He presented his paper "On the propagation of heat in solid bodies" (1807), where he claimed that any function can be expanded as a series of sines (Fourier series). The ink pressed copy of the Rosetta Stone he brought from Egypt inspired Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), leading to the subsequent decipher of Egyptian writing system.

Paul Dirac (1902~1984): English theoretical physicist. Born to a Swiss family immigrated to Bristol, England, he remained a Swiss national until naturalized in 1919. He got BS degree in Electrical Engineering (1921) and PhD degree from Cambridge (1926). He proposed the Dirac equation as a relativistic equation of motion for the wavefunction of the electron (1928), predicting the existence of the positron (antiparticle of the electron). His "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" published in 1930 quickly became one of the textbooks on the subject, where he introduced the delta function. The bra-ket notation universally used nowadays was first introduced in the 3rd edition of this book (1939). He was the professor of mathematics at Cambridge (1932-69). He earned the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Erwin Schrödinger in 1933. He spent the last 14 years in Florida, USA.

Peter Franken (1928~1999): American physicist. He observed the second-harmonic generation for the first time at University of Michigan (1961), initializing the experimental nonlinear optics.

Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels (1865~1913): German physicist. He obtained PhD degree from University of Göttingen (1888), and was professor of theoretical physics at University of Heidelberg (1900-13). He discovered that the refractive index of certain birefringent materials can vary linearly with the strength of an external  steady electric field, which is called Pockels effect (1893).

John Kerr (1824~1909): Scottish physicist. He was mathematical lecturer at the Free Church Training College in Glasgow since 1857. He discovered the change of refractive index is proportional to the square of the electric field, which is named Kerr effect (1875).

Venkata Raman (1888~1970): Indian physicist. He was professor in Physics at the University of Calcutta (1917). He discovered that inelastic scattering of light experimentally (1928), and won the Nobel Prize in Physics (1930). He was the first Non-white to receive any Nobel Prize in sciences. He served in the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (1934-44) and established the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore (1944-70).