The astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, son of a Jewish businessman in Frankfurt am Main, is famous for a multitude of pioneering scientific achievements in various fields of research.

Schwarzschild makes improvements to observation methods and plays a leading role in introducing photographical techniques to astronomy. He applies methods and findings in physics and chemistry to astronomy thus becoming the pioneer of German astrophysics. He investigates fundamental problems in astronomy and neighboring disciplines, which result in his principal contributions to physics. In particular, he discovers the first exact solutions to the equations that describe the interaction of the gravitational field and matter in Einstein‘s General Theory of Relativity. In early 1916, Schwarzschild completes this work while on service at the Russian front. There, he contracts a skin disease, which leads to his death a few months later.