Ferenc Preisach, In Memoriam

Sixty years ago perhaps the most cited paper in the area of hysteresis modeling, "Uber die magnetische Nachwirkung" by F. Preisach, appeared in Zeitschriftfiir Physik [1]. In the middle of that paper, which discussed magnetic lag in materials, he proposed a method of analyzing magnetic media which has since become known as Preisach Modeling. Although this landmark paper has triggered research that continues to be extremely fertile, due to the circumstances of his untimely death researchers in the field know hardly anything about Preisach the man. In fact, most do not know even his first name. Since he was a victim of the Holocaust, it has been very difficult to obtain anything except for the sketchiest facts about his life. We are publishing this article, giving what information we have been able to obtain, in the hope that it would spur anyone who has any additional information, including possibly a photograph of him, to forward it to us so that we may make it generally available. We felt that this issue of the Transactions would be the most appropriate in which to publish our findings, since this month marks both the ninetieth anniversary of Preisach\´s birth and the fifty-second anniversary of his death.