Edwin Plimpton Adams
Edwin Plimpton Adams was an American physicist known for translating Einstein's lectures. Clinton Joseph Davisson attended his lectures. Adams was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1915.
Biography
Early life and education
Edwin Plimpton Adams was born in Prague, at the time part of Bohemia, on 23 January 1878 to missionary parents. His father, Rev. Edwin Augustus Adams, was an American pastor from Connecticut, who spent 10 years as a representative of the American [Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions|American Board of Foreign Missions] in Prague, before moving back the family back to Northboro, Connecticut, and then Chicago. His mother was Caroline Amelia Plimpton.Adams earned his bachelor's degree at Beloit College in 1899 and PhD in physics at Harvard University in 1904. During his graduate studies he was a Tyndall fellow at Harvard which allowed him to study at Berlin, Göttingen, and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Career
In 1903, Adams was hired as an instructor for the Princeton University Physics Department, helping expand the four person department originally consisting of Cyrus Fogg Brackett, William Francis Magie, E. H. Loomis, and Howard McClenahan. During his first few years, Adams taught courses in a number of subjects at the undergraduate and graduate level and took on graduate students to work on experimental research in electricity and magnetism. He became a full professor in 1909 and his research interests later shifted to theory when he took over teaching advanced theoretical physics and applied mathematics courses when James H Jeans left Princeton to return to England.During World War I, Adams took leave from Princeton to join the Royal Engineers of the British Army. He was in active service in France with a sound-ranging company from 1917 to 1919, and he was later made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.