Maximilian Herzberger


Maximilian Jacob Herzberger was a German-American mathematician and physicist, known for his development of the superachromat lens.

Life

Maximilian Herzberger was the son of Leopold Herzberger and Sonja/Sofia Behrendt/Berendt/Berends ; he had a sister Olga. The family was Jewish.
He studied mathematics and physics at the Berlin University, where Albert Einstein was one of his professors, and later became a friend and advisor.
In 1923, Herzberger finished his Ph.D. thesis Ueber Systeme hyperkomplexer Grössen under Ludwig Bieberbach and Issai Schur at the philosophical faculty.
In 1925, he married Edith Kaufmann ;
they had three children, born in Jena, viz. Ruth, Ursula Bellugi, and Hans.
No later than Sep 1930, he was assistant of Hans Boegehold, the chief of calculation office at Carl Zeiss Jena.
In 1934, the Nazis deprived him from his professorship at Jena University and his contract with Zeiss. Leaving Germany with a "total of $10 in my pockets"., he went initially to the Netherlands, where he was hosted by the Dutch physicist A.C.S. van Heel. After the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he emigrated with his family to Rochester (NY),
where he became head of Eastman Kodak's optical research laboratories, arranged by Einstein.
In 1940, he and his family became U.S. citizens.
In 1945, he got the Cressy Morrison Award of the New York Academy of Sciences.
In 1954 he finished the development of the superachromat as the ultimately well-corrected lens for Kodak.
in 1959, he was part of the inaugural class of Fellows of the Optical Society of America. In 1962, he was awarded the Frederic Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America.
In 1965, he retired from his position at Kodak, and helped building a graduate institute for optics in Switzerland,
until in 1968 he followed invitation of the University of New Orleans to teach at their Physics Department.
He held patents for an "apochromatic telescope objective having three air spaced components", and a "superachromatic objective". He died on 9 April 1982.

Publications