Carl Hermann

Who was Carl Hermann?

Carl Hermann was a German professor of crystallography. With Charles-Victor Mauguin, he invented an international standard notation for crystallographic groups known as the Hermann–Mauguin notation or International notation.

Born in the north German port town of Wesermünde to parents both of long-time ministerial families, he got his doctorate from Göttingen in 1923, as a pupil of Max Born and a fellow student with Werner Heisenberg. With Paul P. Ewald at Stuttgart, he nurtured the growing field of crystallography, especially the study of space groups, and began what was later to become Structure Reports, a reference series giving every known crystal structure determination.

When the Nazi Party rose to power, he objected to its political restrictions on academic positions, leaving to take a position as a physicist with industrial dye firm I.G. Farbenwerke at Ludwigshafen, where he continued his crystallographic research and studied symmetry in higher-dimensional spaces. During World War II, he and his wife Eva helped many Jews hide and escape the Holocaust, for which he was imprisoned and sentenced to death.