Johann Jakob Balmer

Johann Jakob Balmer was a Swiss mathematician best known for his work in physics, the Balmer series of the hydrogen atom. Born in Lausen in 1825, the son of a chief justice of the same name, he excelled in mathematics at school and studied at the University of Karlsruhe and the University of Berlin before completing a PhD at the University of Basel in 1849 with a dissertation on the cycloid. He then lived in Basel, where he taught at a school for girls and lectured at the University of Basel. In 1885, at the age of sixty, he found an empirical formula for the wavelengths of the visible spectral lines of hydrogen, which gives its name to the Balmer series and the Balmer constant.