Wilhelm Cauer, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetWilhelm Cauer
German mathematician and scientist
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Berlin
About Wilhelm Cauer
- Wilhelm Cauer (24 June 1900 – 22 April 1945) was a German mathematician and scientist.
- He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis.
- Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions.
- This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design.
- Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specification for the design of an electronic filter. Cauer initially specialised in general relativity but soon switched to electrical engineering.
- His work for a German subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company brought him into contact with leading American engineers in the field of filters.
- This proved useful when Cauer was unable to feed his children during the German economic crisis of the 1920s and he moved to the US.
- He studied early computer techniques in the US prior to returning to Germany.
- According to Wilhelm Cauer's son Emil the rise of Nazism in Germany stifled Cauer's career because he had a remote Jewish ancestor.
- Cauer was executed during the fall of Berlin by Soviet soldiers. The manuscripts for some of Cauer's most important unpublished works were destroyed during the war.
- However, his family succeeded in reconstructing much of this from his notes and volume II of Theorie der linearen Wechselstromschaltungen was published after his death.
- Cauer's legacy continues today, with network synthesis being the method of choice for network design.
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