URL: https://www.desy.de/news/@@news-view
Breadcrumb Navigation
06.12.2011
DESY recalls its founding father
Today, Willibald Jentschke would have turned 100 years
The foundation of DESY in 1959 was above all realised thanks to the vision, charisma, persistence and negotiating skills of this man: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Willibald Jentschke. Today, the physicist whose appointment to the University of Hamburg brought about the research centre DESY, would have turned 100 years.
Willibald Jentschke, born in Vienna, was appointed as professor at the University of Hamburg in 1955. With his research work in Austria and the United States, he had gained reputation in the field of nuclear physics, and he was to establish nuclear physics which was again allowed in the Federal Republic of Germany(at that time particle physics hat not established itself as a separate discipline).For the start of his professorship in Hamburg, Jentschke envisioned something which could not be carried out by a single university alone: he planned to build a globally competitive particle physics particle accelerator. With his great persuasiveness and negotiating skills, he succeeded in convincing the funding authorities from Hamburg and the German government to grant him the at that time incredible sum of 7.5 million deutschmarks for his project – the nucleus of today’s research centre DESY.
Jentschke was Chairman of the DESY Directorate from 1959 to 1970. Afterwards, when he was Director General of CERN, but also after his retirement and into old age, he was always actively involved in particle physics and always very interested in “his” DESY developing into one of the world’s leading accelerator laboratories.
Willibald Jentschke passed away in 2002, only a few months after his 90th birthday. In honour of its founding father, DESY annually organises the Jentschke Lectures (in English), with top-class scientists giving lectures on current research themes.
Jentschke Lectures and a comprehensive biography of Willibald Jentschke
