The New Student's Reference Work/Ohm, Georg Simon

Ohm (ōm), Georg Simon, a German mathematician and physicist, was born at Erlangen, March 16, 1787, and died at Münich, July 7, 1854. He was educated at the university of his native town, where he took his doctor's degree in 1811. In 1827 he published his great work on the galvanic circuit, in which he proved the simple relation existing between current, resistance and electromotive force, a relation known as Ohm's law. For this discovery Ohm was awarded the Copley medal by the Royal Society in 1841. In 1846-49 Kirchhoff extended this law and established two theorems known as Kirchhoff's laws, which include Ohm's as a special case. In acoustics Ohm discovered that the ear of itself analyzes any complex sound into simple tones in the manner contemplated in Fourier's theorem, a fact which later proved of great importance in the hands of Helmholtz.  In 1852 Ohm was appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Munich. His most important work, by all odds, is his theorem concerning the galvanic circuit.