Rudolf Seeliger (12 November 1886 – 20 January 1965) was a German physicist who specialized in electric discharges in gases and plasma physics. From 1906 to 1909, Seeliger studied at the University of Tübingen and the University of Heidelberg. He then became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, where he got his doctorate in 1910. The topic of his thesis, the physics of electrical currents in gas, set the theme for his life’s field of research. He then went to conduct postgraduate research, on the same topic, at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Berlin. In 1915, he was also a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. In 1918, he was called by Johannes Stark, Director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Greifswald, to be extraordinarius pr