Milutin Milanković’s time in Serbia

In their article “Physics in the former Yugoslavia: From socialist dreams to capitalist realities ” (Physics Today, August 2019, page 30), authors Mićo Tatalović and Nenad Jarić Dauenhauer wrote that “Although the region gave the world these eminent physicists”—referring to Jožef Stefan, Andrija Mohorovičić, Milutin Milanković, Nikola Tesla, and others—“all of them worked abroad.” For Milanković, at least, that statement may mislead readers: Although he did work abroad, he spent most of his scientific career in Serbia.

Milanković (1879–1958) is best known for discovering the Milankovitch cycles, changes in climate driven by variations in insolation at midlatitudes caused by changes in Earth’s orbit over tens of thousands of years. He studied engineering at the Technical University of Vienna and earned his doctorate there in 1904 with a thesis on reinforced concrete, a new material at the time. He worked in Vienna until 1909, when he accepted the chair in applied mathematics at the University of Belgrade. There he taught mechanics, celestial mechanics, and theoretical physics and developed his astronomical theory of climate.

Milanković was on his honeymoon in 1914 in his hometown of Dalj, in Croatia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the empire declared war on Serbia in July. A Serbian citizen, Milanković became a prisoner of war. Due to pressure from Austrian scientists, he was released on Christmas Eve 1914, and he was offered two choices, to live in Vienna or in Budapest. He chose Budapest because, as he noted, “in Vienna everybody was starving.” He returned to Belgrade in March 1919 and remained there until his death in 1958.

Milanković vividly recorded the above details in his extensive diaries, which the Serbian Academy of Sciences published in the 1950s. A small part was translated from Serbian into English by his son, Vasko, in Milutin Milanković 1879–1958, published in 1995 by the European Geophysical Society.