(1824-1887)
He was born in 1824 in the present-day city of Kaliningrad in Russia.
Although most of his life on crutches or wheelchairs was a very productive scientist. He began by being a student of Gauss having worked in the Universities of Berlin, without obtaining an orderly, and of Breslau.
In 1854 he was hired by the University of Heidelberg where he collaborated with Bunsen in the development of the technique of spectroscopy, a technique that allows analyzing the chemical composition of a substance from the light it emits. He applied this technique in the study of the chemical composition of the Sun explaining the origin of its absorption spectrum.
In the same year, he published the so-called Kirchhoff laws as a result of the development of Ohm's work on circuit theory.
It played an important role in the study of blackbody radiation, one of the bases of future quantum theory.
Among his other famous works are the four volumes on physics-mathematics and the Treaty on Mechanics (1876) which together with the works of Mach and Hertz marked a new era in the interpretation of mechanics.
