About Wilhelm Cauer
Wilhelm Cauer (24 June 1900 – 22 April 1945) was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specification for the design of an electronic filter. Cauer initially specialised in general relativity but soon switched to electrical engineering. His work for a German subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company brought him into contact with leading American engineers in the field of filters. This proved useful when Cauer was unable to feed his children during the German economic crisis of the 1920s and he moved to the US. He studied early computer techniques in the US prior to returning to Germany. According to Wilhelm Cauer's son Emil the rise of Nazism in Germany stifled Cauer's career because he had a remote Jewish ancestor. Cauer was murdered during the fall of Berlin by Soviet soldiers. The manuscripts for some of Cauer's most important unpublished works were destroyed during the war. However, his family succeeded in reconstructing much of this from his notes and volume II of Theorie der linearen Wechselstromschaltungen was published after his death. Cauer's legacy continues today, with network synthesis being the method of choice for network design. His early grammar school (gymnasium) was the Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium, an institution founded by his great-grandfather, Ludwig Cauer. Cauer started off in a field completely unrelated to filters; from 1922 he worked with Max von Laue on general relativity, and his first publication (1923) was in this field. Cauer became interested in mathematics at the age of thirteen and continued to demonstrate that he was academically inclined as he grew. The rising force of Nazism became a major obstacle to Cauer's work from 1933 onwards.
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