Theodor Förster
Theodor Förster was a German physical chemist.
Theodor Förster undertook a Ph.D. under Erwin Madelung at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In the same year he joined the Nazi Party and the SA. After his habilitation he became a lecturer in Leipzig. In Leipzig he worked closely with Peter Debye, Werner Heisenberg, Hans Kautzky and Karl‐Friedrich Bonhoeffer.
Following his research and teaching activities in Leipzig, he became a professor at the State University of Poznan, in occupied Poland.
From 1947 to 1951 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen before becoming a professor at the University of Stuttgart.
Among his greatest achievements is his contribution to the understanding of FRET. The term Förster radius, which is related to the FRET phenomenon, is named after Theodor Förster.
He also proposed the Förster cycle to predict the acid dissociation constant of a photoacid.
He also discovered excimer formation in solutions of pyrene.Work
- Förster, Theodor: Fluoreszenz organischer Verbindungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1950. – Unveränd. Nachdr. d. 1. Aufl., im Literaturverz. erg. um spätere Veröff. d. Autors. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982 – *
Literature
- A. Weller: Nachruf auf Theodor Förster. In: Berichte der Bunsengesellschaft für Physikalische Chemie 78 p. 969 .
- George Porter: Some reflections on the work of Theodor Förster. In: Die Naturwissenschaften 63 5, p. 207–211.
