Paul Peter Ewald, FRS[1] (January 23, 1888 – August 22, 1985) was a German crystallographer and physicist, a pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods.
[2] Ewald received his early education in the classics at the Gymnasium in Berlin and Potsdam, where he learned to speak Greek, French, and English, in addition to his native German.
[3] Ewald began his higher education in physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, during the winter of 1905.
[5] In 1907, he continued his mathematical studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), under Arnold Sommerfeld at his Institute for Theoretical Physics.
It was on a walk through Englischer Garten in Munich, in January, that Ewald was telling Max von Laue about his thesis topic.
[7] [12] During Ewald’s stay in Göttingen, he was often a visitor at El BoKaReBo, a boarding house run by Sister Annie at Dahlmannstrasse 17.
[14] Later that year, Ewald attended the Birmingham meeting of the British Association where he heard accounts and discussions of James Jeans’ review on radiation theory and Bohr’s model.
Ewald’s paper has been widely cited in the literature as well as scientific books, such as Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices,[23] by Max Born and Kun Huang.
[27][28][29] At Göttingen, Richard Courant had taken Hilbert’s lecture notes which were available in the Lesezimmer, edited them and added to them to write a two-volume work.
[30] Upon seeing the book, Ewald was compelled to write a detailed review describing it as providing mathematical tools, characterized by eigenvalues and eigenfunctions, for the theoretical physics then being developed.
[36] He emigrated to England in 1937 along with his mother, the painter Clara Ewald,[37] and took a research position in Cambridge, until he was offered and accepted a lectureship at Queen's University Belfast in 1939.
[3][27][29] While lecturing at Duke University in 1937, Hans Bethe, who got his doctorate under Sommerfeld in 1928, bumped into Ewald's daughter Rose, who had already emigrated to the United States and who was attending the school.
[39] Also, toward the end of World War II, Ewald was concerned that peace would result in the establishment of multiple, competing national journals of crystallography.
So, in 1944, at Oxford, he proposed the establishment of an International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) that would have sole responsibility for publishing crystallographic research.
The first issue of Acta Crystallographica was published in 1948, the same year that Ewald chaired the first General Assembly and International Congress of the IUCr, which was held at Harvard University.