Klein, Oskar. 1894-1977 Oskar Klein Papers

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:
Born Mörby, Sweden, 1894, as the youngest son of Sweden's first rabbi, Gottlieb Klein. From the age of 15 he worked, on Svante Arrhenius' invitation, at the Nobel Inst. on the solubility of salts with radioactive indicators. From 1918 K. frequently visited Copenhagen and he stayed there after completing his doctoral dissertation at Stockholms Högskola, 1921. His interest turned to quantum theory and with Svein Rosseland, he introduced "collisions of the second kind". Stayed at Ann Arbor, Michigan 1923-25. Docent, Lund U., 1926. Introduced relativistic wave equation (Klein-Gordon equation). Lecturer NBI 1927. Deeply involved in Bohr's work on correspondence and complementarity. The Klein-Nishina formula (1929) convinced many physicists of the soundness of Dirac's relativistic equation, in spite of difficulties, one of them known as Klein's paradox. Prof. math. phys. Stockholm Högskola 1930-62. Worked on statistical mechanics, superconductivity (with Jens Lindhard, 1945), distributions of chemical elements and cosmology (cosmological model with Alfvén, 1963). Died Stockholm 1977.

DESCRIPTION OF COLLECTION:
One box with manuscripts 1920s-1960s. One box with correspondence (1916-1970). Correspondents include: Pierre Auger, E. Bauer, Guido Beck, Harald Bohr, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Ernst Cassirer, Stanley Deser, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Paul Ehrenfest, Franzinetti, George Gamow, Walter Gordon, Dirk ter Haar, Douglas Rayner Hartree, Dmitri Iwanenko, Pascual Jordan, Jens Lindhard, Fritz London, Robert Eugene Marshak, Thomas Marshall, Lise Meitner, Yoshio Nishina, Carl Wilhelm Oseen, Wolfgang Pauli, Léon Rosenfeld, Svein Rosseland, Abdus Salam, Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, John Archibald Wheeler, Gian Carlo Wick, Hideki Yukawa.

Two boxes. Correspondence, alphabetic. Manuscripts, chronological
List of items. Danish, Swedish, German and English