biography
| name: |
London, Fritz (Wolfgang)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1900–54)
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| biography:
| Physicist, born in Wrocław, SW Poland (formerly Breslau, Prussia). He studied at Frankfurt and Munich, then did research in philosophy at Bonn. He worked at Zürich, and devised the quantum theory of the chemical bond with Walter Heitler (1927). In 1930 he calculated the non-polar component of forces between molecules, now called van der Waals or London forces. With his brother Heinz he fled from Germany in 1933 to the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, where they published major papers on superconductivity, giving the London equations (1935). Fritz moved to Duke University in the USA as professor of chemistry (1939–54), and became a US citizen in 1945. |
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