Svein Rosseland was born in
Vikør Municipality (now called
Kvam Municipality), in
Hardanger, Norway. Rosseland grew up the youngest of nine siblings. He went to his final exams in
Haugesund in 1917 and then went to the
University of Oslo. After only three semesters at the university, he left in 1919 to work as an assistant professor with the meteorologist
Vilhelm Bjerknes at the
Bergen School of Meteorology. In 1920 he went to the Institute of Physics (now the
Niels Bohr Institute) in
Copenhagen, where he met
Niels Bohr and other prominent physicists, and where he wrote two seminal papers. He spent 1924–1926 as a Rockefeller Fellow at the
Mount Wilson Observatory in
Pasadena, California. In 1927, Rosseland earned a PhD. from the University of Oslo. As a professor at the University of Oslo from 1928 to 1964, he built up and headed academics at the
Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics (
Institutt for Teoretisk Astrofysikk). Rosseland was a key participant when the University of Oslo built the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics in 1934, using funding from the
Rockefeller Foundation. Between 1929-30 he was a guest professor at the
Harvard College Observatory. In 1934 he founded the journal
Astrophysics Norvegica, published by the
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 1936 he published his textbook
Theoretical Astrophysics, which contained numerous original contributions. Rosseland was instrumental in the effort behind the building of the
Oslo Analyzer, finished in 1938 and for four years the world's most powerful
differential analyzer. With the
German occupation of Norway in World War II, he fled the country and went to the
United States, where he was appointed a professor at
Princeton University. In 1943 he went to
London to work with the development of
radar by the
British Air Defense Ministry and later at the
Admiralty, where he worked on underwater explosions. He was also a consultant for the U.S. Time Corporation, a company that later evolved into the Norwegian-owned company
Timex Group USA. In the war's final years, he worked on military research at
Columbia University. Rosseland returned to Norway in 1946. In the postwar period he was involved in the development of the Norwegian research policy and was among those involved in the creation of the
Institute for Energy Technology which was established in 1948 and
Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences which was founded during 1955. He was also the driving force behind the creation of
Harestua Solar Observatory located at Gunnarshaugen in
Oppland, which was inaugurated in 1954. Rosseland was Norwegian delegate to the
CERN Council in the early days of the organization. == Legacy ==