Ludwig Mach (8 November 1868

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

– September 1951) was an Austrian physician and chemist. Building on the work of

Ludwig Zehnder Ludwig Louis Albert Zehnder (4 May 1854, in Illnau – 24 March 1949, in Oberhofen am Thunersee) was a Swiss physicist, one of the inventors of the Mach–Zehnder interferometer. Early life Zehnder studied mechanical engineering in Zurich ...

in 1891, Mach added refinements to an instrument which became known as the

Mach–Zehnder interferometer The Mach–Zehnder interferometer is a device used to determine the relative phase shift variations between two collimated beams derived by splitting light from a single source. The interferometer has been used, among other things, to measure p ...

. He went on to employ photography for collecting visual data streamlines in the field of

aerodynamics Aerodynamics () is the study of the motion of atmosphere of Earth, air, particularly when affected by a solid object, such as an airplane wing. It involves topics covered in the field of fluid dynamics and its subfield of gas dynamics, and is an ...

. Ludwig is the son of the physicist

Ernst Mach Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach ( ; ; 18 February 1838 – 19 February 1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the understanding of the physics of shock waves. The ratio of the speed of a flow or object to that of ...

. In 1894 he registered the patent for Magnalium, an aluminum alloy with 2 to 30% magnesium, which was to be the precursor of the entire 5000 series of aluminum alloys. Its commercialization brought him significant profits.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mach, Ludwig 1868 births 1951 deaths Austrian physicists Austrian chemists Scientists from Austria-Hungary Scientists from Prague

See also

References