Theodor Förster

Theodor Förster (May 15, 1910 – May 20, 1974) was a German physical chemist.

Theodor Förster undertook a Ph.D. under Erwin Madelung at the University of Frankfurt am Main (1933). In the same year he joined the Nazi Party and the SA.[1] After his habilitation (in 1940) he became a lecturer in Leipzig. In Leipzig he worked closely with Peter Debye, Werner Heisenberg, Hans Kautzky and Karl‐Friedrich Bonhoeffer.[2] Following his research and teaching activities in Leipzig, he became a professor at the State University of Poznan, in occupied Poland (1942).[2]

From 1947 to 1951 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen before becoming a professor at the University of Stuttgart.[2]

Among his greatest achievements is his contribution to the understanding (1946) of FRET (Förster resonance energy transfer). The term Förster radius, which is related to the FRET phenomenon, is named after Theodor Förster.[2]

He also proposed the Förster cycle to predict the acid dissociation constant of a photoacid.[2] He also discovered excimer formation in solutions of pyrene.[2][3]

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 – ISBN 3-525-42312-8*

Literature
  • A. Weller: Nachruf auf Theodor Förster. In: Berichte der Bunsengesellschaft für Physikalische Chemie 78 (1974) p. 969 [with Porträt].
  • George Porter: Some reflections on the work of Theodor Förster. In: Die Naturwissenschaften 63 (1976) 5, p. 207–211.

References
  1. Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Zweite aktualisierte Auflage, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 158.
  2. Kramer, Horst E. A.; Fischer, Peter (9 November 2010). "The Scientific Work of Theodor Förster: A Brief Sketch of his Life and Personality". ChemPhysChem. 12 (3): 555–558. doi:10.1002/cphc.201000733. PMID 21344592.
  3. Förster, Theodor (May 1969). "Excimers". Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English. 8 (5): 333–343. doi:10.1002/anie.196903331.
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