It's the birthday of Walter Schottky, who was born in 1886 in Zürich. Switzerland. Schottky earned his PhD in physics in 1912 at Berlin's Humboldt University, where his advisers were Max Planck and Heinrich Rubens. Although Schottky's thesis was on special relativity, his most famous result, derived in 1914, was a classical term for the interaction energy between a point charge and a flat metal surface. The formula proved useful in the young field of electronics, to which Schottky continued to contribute, both as a theorist and as an inventor. The German Physical Society's annual prize for outstanding research on solid-state physics is named after him.
