Ludwig Waldmann

Ludwig Waldmann (8 June 1913 in Fürth – 9 February 1980) was a German physicist who specialized in transport phenomena in gases. He derived the Waldmann-Snider equation.

Career Waldmann completed his Ph.D. under Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1938. He was Sommerfeld’s assistant, at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, from 1937 to 1939. Waldman had been the scribe for Sommerfeld’s optics course in 1934, and Waldmann’s careful record of the lectures were the basis for Sommerfeld’s book Optics - Lectures on Theoretical Physics Volume IV.

After being granted his Ph.D. in 1938, his career spanned four decades with many publications to his name (at least 99): his 220-page article “Transporterscheinungen in Gasen von mittlerem Druck” – a chapter in the article conveyed the then new quantum mechanics version of the Boltzmann equation, which later became known as the Waldmann-Snider equation. The original Waldmann publications on the equation appeared in the literature in 1957 and 1958. Independently, R. F. Snider, a Canadian, published the same kinetic equation in 1960.

Klaus Clusius, Gerhard Dickel, and Ludwig Waldmann Über die Beeinflussung des Wirkungsgrades von Draht-Trennrohren durch Zentrierung und Einbaur von Scheiben G-132 (20 February 1942)