Arnold Sommerfeld was born in Bavaria, Germany, on October 25, 1868. In 1886, at the age of 14, he became an apprentice in a firm of instrument makers in Munich. In 1891 he became a member of the Bayerische Verein für Industrielle optische Gewerbe (the Bavarian Society for Industrial Optics) and moved to Munich in 1893 to pursue a career in optics. Two years later he became a student at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, where he studied physics with Alexander Riemann and mathematics with Hermann Minkowski
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In 1896 he was awarded a doctorate degree for his thesis on the theory of double refraction. From 1896 to 1898, Sommerfeld worked as an assistant to Gustav Kirchhoff in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and Technology in Berlin, where he continued his research on double refraction with Kirchhoff. In 1898 Sommerfeld went to England as a physicist with the firm of Marconi Brothers in London.
There he worked on improving wireless telegraphy and invented a regenerative circuit that was used to reduce interfering signals from nearby transmitters. In 1904 Sommerfeld returned to Germany and resumed his optical research work in Munich under Max Planck's direction. He also published papers with Max Planck and Robert Bunsen on the theory of double refraction and diffraction.
In 1908 Sommerfeld accepted an appointment at Berlin University as professor of physics and director of the Institute for Radio Research (Institut für Radioforschung). At the outbreak of World War I he went back to England as an army officer assigned to develop radio telephony systems for the British army. After more than ten years' absence from Germany, Sommerfeld returned to teach at Berlin University from 1915 until his death on July 15, 1967.
It was here that his students provided him with his most important scientific contribution: quantum mechanics.