Earthquake on a stamp: Emil Wiechert honored

To commemorate the 150th birthday of Emil Wiechert, one of the world's first professors of geophysics, the German Federal Ministry of Finance issued a stamp; on it, Wiechert, who was born 26 December 1861, is standing behind one of his famous seismographs and a seismogram of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake recorded at the geophysical institute of the University of Göttingen (Figure 1). Wiechert was born in 1861 in the city of Tilsit, northeastern Prussia (now Sovetsk, Russia). In 1881 he enrolled at the university in the nearby city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where he studied physics and received his doctoral degree in 1889. From 1890 to 1897 Wiechert worked as an assistant at the Institute of Physics at Königsberg University and during this time made himself a name in theoretical and experimental research.