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Fritz Houtermans
Physicist (1903-1966)
Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans (January 22, 1903 – March 1, 1966) was a Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and nuclear physicist and Communist born in Zoppot (now Sopot) near Danzig (now Gdańsk), West Prussia to a Dutch father, who was a wealthy banker. He was brought up in Vienna, where he was educated, and moved to Göttingen when he was 18 to study.
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It was in Göttingen where he obtained his Ph.D. under James Franck. With Robert d'Escourt Atkinson, he made the first estimates of the rate of stellar nuclear fusion. Houtermans began his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1921, and he received his doctorate under James Franck in 1927, the same year Robert Oppenheimer received his doctorate under Max Born. He completed his Habilitation under Gustav Hertz at Technische Universität Berlin, in 1932. Hertz and Franck were Nobel laureates; they shared the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics. While at Göttingen, Houtermans met Enrico Fermi, George Gamow, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Victor Frederick Weisskopf. Houtermans and Gamow did pioneering work on quantum tunneling in 1928. Houtermans, in 1929, with Robert d'Escourt Atkinson, made the first calculation of stellar nuclear fusion reactions.
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