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Ulrich Max Richard Hofmann (* 26). June 1931 in Dolsthaida, Liebenwerda district is a German physicist in the field of solid state physics. From 1970 to 1990 he was Vice President of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. After the reunification and reunification, he worked as a management consultant, in particular for business relations with Russia, and was Managing Director of the MPM Technology Transfer and Marketing Company from 1993 to 1996.

Life and education

Ulrich Hofmann is the son of the industrial clerk and magazine manager Max Hofmann and his wife Marta Hofmann born Pohle. Since 1958 he was married to the museum educator Oktyabrina Vartanovna Hofmann born Abgarjan, who died in 2018. The two daughters Ilona-Carmen Leisenberg were born Hofmann (* 1959) and Simone Hofmann (* 1964).

From 1937 to 1941 he attended Dolsthaida elementary school. Subsequently, he was a student at the Private High School in Lauchhammer until the end of the Second World War.

In June 1945, he joined the then Soviet stock company Kombinat “Friedländer”, Mückenberg, in his apprenticeship, which he completed in 1948 as a mining engineer and factory locksmith with the skilled workers’ letter. After that, he worked for six months as a technician in the construction of a power plant in the brown coal complex “Pfännerhall” in Braunsbedra near Merseburg.

In the first half of 1949 Hofmann took part in a preparatory course for engineering studies at the district vocational school Bad Liebenwerda in Elsterwerda. From 1949 to 1951 he attended the Workers and Peasants Faculty (ABF) of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Halle (Saale) and graduated there.

Subsequently, he studied physics at the Dresden University of Technology for one year and then, from 1952, the field of energy engineering at the Moscow Energetic Institute. From 1953 he studied physics at Lomonosov University Moscow. A particular highlight of his studies was the lectures on theoretical physics with Lev Dawidowitsch Landau (Physics Nobel Prize 1962). In 1958, Ulrich Hofmann completed his experimental study of the temperature dependence of the saturation magnetization of nickel-copper alloys and their susceptibility in strong fields as a physicist. His academic teacher was Yevgeny Ivanovich Kondorsky.

During his student years in Moscow, a close friendship developed with his fellow German student in physics Hardwin Jungclaussen, a close relative of the world-renowned physicists Heinrich Hertz and Gustav Hertz, who has lasted all his life.

Research Institute for Special Materials Dresden at the Academy of Sciences

From 1958 to 1969 Hofmann worked at the Research Institute for Metallic Special Materials Dresden of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (DAW), which was founded in 1952 by Friedrich Eisenkolb and Günther Rassmann word