Lenz

Lenz is a surname of German origin. Notable people with the name include Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792), a German poet associated with the Sturm und Drang movement, and Heinrich Friedrich Lenz, a Baltic German physicist who formulated Lenz's law in the early 19th century.

Lenz's law is a fundamental principle of electromagnetism. It states that the direction of an induced electromotive force and the resulting current in a closed circuit opposes the change in magnetic flux that produced them. The law is commonly expressed with Faraday's law as emf = -dΦB/dt, where the negative sign indicates opposition to the flux change. It underpins the operation of electric generators, transformers, and many induction-based devices.

Lenz is also the title of Georg Büchner's novella Lenz (1836), a short prose work about the life of the German poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. The work explores themes of isolation, mental illness, and the struggles of artistic life.