Josef Goubeau (31 March 1901 in Augsburg, Germany – 18 October 1990 in Stuttgart) was a German chemist.

Life and work

Goubeau studied chemistry at the University of Munich starting from 1921 and attained a doctorate there 1926 on the atomic weight regulation of the potassiumin the group of Otto Hönigschmid under the supervision of Eduard Zintl. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Freiburg, the mountain academy Clausthal-Zellerfeld, where he made his postdoctoral lecture qualification in 1935 on the Raman effect in analytical chemistry. Starting from 1940 he became a university teacher at the University of Göttingen, and since 1951 professor at the technical University of Stuttgart. His focus of activity was the inorganic synthetic chemistry and spectroscopy of compounds of boron, silicon and phosphorus. Most important was his fundamental work about vibrational spectroscopy and to force constants as measure of the strength of chemical bonds.

Honours