Otto Hittmair


Otto Hittmair was an Austrian theoretical physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, superconductivity and unified field theory. From 1987 to 1991 he was President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Life

Otto Hittmair was born in Innsbruck on March 16, 1924. He graduated with distinction from the University of Innsbruck in 1942. He worked with Erwin Schrödinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in the late 1940s and together with him, published work on a unified field theory.
He worked abroad at the Institut Henri Poincaré, the University of Sydney, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge where he was a Fulbright scholar.
His specialty was nuclear reactions, especially stripping reactions, in which nucleons are exchanged between the scattering nuclei. In 1958-1960 he worked at the Atomic Institute of the Austrian Universities and in 1960 became Professor of Theoretical Physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Technical University of Vienna.
He was Dean of the Faculty of Science from 1968 to 1969 and then Rector of the Technical University of Vienna from 1977 to 1979.
Otto Hittmair died on September 5, 2003 in a climbing accident in the Nordkette mountain range near Innsbruck. The main-belt asteroid 10782 Hittmair discovered in 1991 is named after him. Otto-Hittmair-Platz in Innsbruck is named in his honor.

Works