Ernst Katz

Ernst Katz, PhD (1913–2009), was born in the Silesian region of what today is the Czech Republic. At the end of World War I, Ernst’s parents moved with their young family to the Netherlands and Dutch became his adopted mother tongue. At the age of sixteen in The Hague, he had his first encounter with Anthroposophy in the person of Dr. Zeylmans van Emmichoven. At twenty years of age, he spent two semesters in graduate school in Princeton University, New Jersey—his first encounter with life in the U.S. Back in Utrecht, he obtained his Master of Science in 1937, and in the years leading up to World War II was engaged in research in biophysics at the Rockefeller Institute at the University of Utrecht. He obtained his doctorate in physics on the very last possible day in 1941.

Ernst Katz received an invitation to join the faculty at the Physics Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he specialized in solid-state physics. He taught, conducted research, and published scientific articles for thirty-three years, until his retirement in 1980. He also taught interdepartmental credit courses in the university on various aspects of Rudolf Steiner’s work—likely the only professor in the U.S. at that time to teach courses in both natural science and spiritual science at the university level.

Ernst Katz and his wife Katherine were instrumental in founding various anthroposophic initiatives in North America, especially in the Great Lakes area. Dr. Katz regularly wrote articles for anthroposophic periodicals, published a number of booklets (now contained in Core Anthroposophy), and was a frequent lecturer throughout North America and Europe on various topics related to Anthroposophy and science. He died at the age of ninety-six at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.