Otto Ernst Heinrich Klemperer
German physicist / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto Ernst Heinrich Klemperer (1899–1987[1]) was a physicist expert in electron optics. He was granted his doctorate by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 1923.[2] His thesis advisor was Hans Geiger.[2] He continued to work with Geiger in the 1930s.[3]
Klemperer was co-inventor in 1928 of the Geiger-Klemperer ball counter,[4] "the first major advance in the design of proportional counters".[5] During the 1930s, he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge on discrepancies between Fermi's theory of β-decay and the observed radiation properties of rubidium and polonium.[3] He was later an assistant professor and Reader in Physics at Imperial College, London,[6] where he wrote the third edition of his book on electron optics with Mike Barnett.[7]
The conductor Otto Klemperer was his father's cousin.[8] His uncle was the Romanist Victor Klemperer.