Georg Simon Ohm (17 March 1789 6 July 1854) was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm began his research with the recently invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that there is a direct proportionality between the potential difference (voltage) applied across a conductor and the resultant electric current. This relationship is now known as Ohm's law.

Early Life

Georg Simon Ohm was born in Erlangen, Bavaria, son to Johann Wolfgang Ohm, a locksmith and Maria Elizabeth Beck, the daughter of a tailor in Erlangen. They were a Protestant family. Although his parents had not been formally educated, Ohm's father was a respected man who had educated himself to a high level and was able to give his sons an excellent education through his own teachings.

His studies had stood him in good position for his receiving a doctorate from Erlangen on 25 October 1811 and immediately joined the staff as a mathematics lecturer. After three semesters Ohm gave up his university post because of unpromising prospects while he couldn't make both ends meet with the lecturing post. The Bavarian government offered him a post as a teacher of mathematics and physics at a poor quality school in Bamberg and he took up the post there in January 1813. Feeling unhappy with his job, Georg devoted to writing an elementary book on Geometry as a way to prove his true ability. The school was then closed down in February 1816. The Bavarian government sent him to an overcrowded school in Bamberg to help out with the mathematics teaching.

After that, he sent the manuscript to King Wilhelm III of Prussia upon its completion. The King was satisfied with Georg's work and he offered Ohm a position at a Jesuit Gymnasium of Cologne on 11 September 1817. Thanks to the school's reputation for science education, Ohm found himself required to teach physics as well as mathematics. Luckily, the physics lab was well-equipped, so Ohm devoted himself to experimenting on physics. Being the son of a locksmith, Georg had some practical experience with mechanical equipment. He published Die galvanishe Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet in 1827, which in English is The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically. Cologne's Jesuit College did not laud his work and Ohm resigned his professorial position there and instead applied to and was employed by the Polytechnic school of Nuremberg (Nrnberg). He came to the polytechnic school of Nuremberg in 1833, and in 1852 became professor of experimental physics in the university of Munich, where he later died. He is buried in the Alter Sdfriedhof in Munich.

The discovery of Ohm's law Ohm's law first appeared in the famous book Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet (The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically) (1827) in which he gave his complete theory of electricity. The book begins with the mathematical background necessary for an understanding of the rest of the work. While his work greatly influenced the theory and applications of current electricity, it was coldly received at that time.

It is interesting that Ohm presents his theory as one of contiguous action, a theory which opposed the concept of action at a distance. Ohm believed that the communication of electricity occurred between "contiguous particles" which is the term Ohm himself used. The paper is concerned with this idea, and in particular with illustrating the differences in scientific approach between Ohm and that of Fourier and Navier. A detailed study of the conceptual framework used by Ohm in formulating Ohm's law has been presented by Archibald.

Ohm's acoustic law Ohm's acoustic law, sometimes called the acoustic phase law or simply Ohm's law, states that a musical sound is perceived by the ear as a set of a number of constituent pure harmonic tones. It is well known to be not quite true.

Study and publications His writings were numerous. The most important was his pamphlet published in Berlin in 1827, with the title Die galvanische Kette mathematisch bearbeitet. This work, the germ of which had appeared during the two preceding years in the journals of Schweigger and Poggendorff, has exerted an important influence on the development of the theory and applications of electric current. Ohm's name has been incorporated in the terminology of electrical science in Ohm's Law (which he first published in Die galvanische Kette...), the proportionality of current and voltage in a resistor, and adopted as the SI unit of resistance, the ohm (symbol ).

Works Die galvanische Kette: mathematisch bearbeitet (The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically) Berlin: Riemann, 1827.Elemente der analytischen Geometrie im Raume am schiefwinkligen Coordinatensysteme (Elements of analytic geometry concerning the skew coordinate system) Nrnberg: Schrag, 1849.Grundzge der Physik als Compendium zu seinen Vorlesungen (Fundamentals of physics: Compendium of lectures) Nrnberg: Schrag, 1854.

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