On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Ian Woollard <[email protected]> wrote: > On 15/01/2011, Carcharoth <[email protected]> wrote: >> To take a specific example, I very occasionally come across names of >> people or topics where it is next-to-impossible to find out anything >> meaningful about them because the name is identical to that of someone >> else. Sometimes this is companies that name themselves after something >> well-known and any search is swamped by hits to that well-known >> namesake. Other times, it is someone more famous swamping a relatively >> obscure person - a recent example I found here is the physicist Otto >> Klemperer. Despite having the name and profession, it is remarkably >> difficult to find information about the physicist as opposed to the >> composer. If I had a birth year, it would be much easier, of course. > > That's the primary advantage of an encyclopedia of course. It doesn't > rely much on the vagaries of English.
Yeah, but it only helps if there is an entry on the person you are looking for information on! So far I have the date of his PhD (1923) in Berlin from the maths geneaology site: http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=62580 And that he worked with Hans Geiger and was the author of a paper in 1934 ('On the Radioactivity of Potassium and Rubidium'): http://www.jstor.org/pss/96293 Plug in "Geiger-Klemperer ball counter" to a search engine, and you begin to get more details (there are a number of devices that are 'loosely' called Geiger counters, but are named for the people that developed them, such as Geiger-Muller, Geiger-Klemperer, and Rutherford-Geiger counters). There is also a William Klemperer (who is a physicist and who has an article on Wikipedia), who is apparently related to the Otto Klemperer who is the famous conductor, but I wonder whether he is related to the Otto Klemperer who is a physicist, and people are confusing the two? I also found a patent here for an electron lens: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/about?id=0ClhAAAAEBAJ Filed by a "Otto Ernst Heinrich Klemperer" on 31 Mar 1944, and issued December 1946. Probably the same Otto Klemperer who was the author of "Electron Optics", which is still in print: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electron-Optics-Cambridge-Monographs-Physics/dp/0521179734 The patent I only just discovered, but that is all I have on this Otto Klemperer at the moment. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
