BRAUN, KARL

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 Having withdrawn for reasons of health to the college of Maraschein (Moravia), he carried out there, in ten assiduous years of study and work, a new and more precise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