Eikhenvald, Aleksandr

Born Dec. 23, 1863 (Jan. 4, 1864), in St. Petersburg; died 1944. Russian physicist.

Eikhenval’d graduated from the St. Petersburg Institute of Railroad Engineers in 1888 and became an engineer. In 1897, after graduating from the Kaiser Wilhelm University (the University of Strasbourg), he joined the staff of the Moscow Engineering School; he was the director of the school from 1905 to 1908. In 1901, Eikhenval’d became a teacher in advanced courses for women. He taught at Moscow University from 1906 to 1911 and from 1917 to 1920. He emigrated in 1920.

Eikhenval’d demonstrated experimentally that a magnetic field arises during the mechanical movement of electrified bodies. In 1904 he proved that convection currents and conduction currents are equivalent. In the same year, he became the first to show experimentally that a magnetic field is created when the polarization of a dielectric changes, that is, in the presence of displacement currents. In 1908 he performed a theoretical study of the propagation of energy during the total internal reflection of light. In 1934, Eikhenval’d carried out a theoretical investigation of the properties of large-amplitude acoustic waves.