Georg Ohm

Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist and schoolteacher whose rigorous mathematical investigations brought order to the fledgling science of electricity. Born to a locksmith in Erlangen who educated him deeply in mathematics, Ohm struggled for decades in poorly funded secondary school teaching posts while yearning for a university professorship.

Using equipment he painstakingly forged himself—including delicate thermocouples devised with Thomas Johann Seebeck to provide a stable voltage—Ohm published his 1827 masterwork, Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet (The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically). In it, he announced Ohm's law: that electrical current through a conductor is directly proportional to voltage and inversely proportional to resistance (V = IR). Initially mocked by German academics who regarded mathematical abstractions of electricity as 'heretical', his work was championed by the Royal Society of London in 1841 with the Copley Medal, finally earning him a chair at Munich. The SI unit of electrical resistance, the ohm (Ω), honors his perseverance.