BRAUN, KARL

KARL BRAUN. — German Jesuit and astronomer, b. at Neustadt (Hesse) on 27 April 1831, d. at Radegund (Styria) on 1 June 1907. He was a student at the German College in Rome and a pupil of Fr. Angelo Secchi. He taught science first at the seminary in Fulda and, after entering the Society of Jesus in 1861 (in the Austrian province), at Pressburg to young religious. From 1878 to 1884, he was the first director of the new observatory erected at Kalocsa (Hungary) by Cardinal Archbishop Haynald; in 1886 he published the observations made there. Retiring, for health reasons, to the college at Marisschein (Moravia), he carried out, in ten years of assiduous study and work, a new and more precise measurement of the constant of terrestrial gravitation (published in vol. LXIV of the Memoirs of the Academy of Vienna). His Christian cosmogony also met with notable favor: Über Kosmogonie vom Standpunkt christlicher Wissenschaft (Münster 1889, 3rd ed. 1905).