On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/01/2011, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com 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/0521...
The patent I only just discovered, but that is all I have on this Otto Klemperer at the moment.
Carcharoth