Victor Conrad

Victor Conrad ( born August 25, 1876 in Vienna, † April 25, 1962 in Cambridge (Massachusetts ), USA; also cited as: Viktor Conrad) was an Austrian-American climatologist and geophysicist ( seismologist ).

Life

Victor Conrad was a geophysicist at the Vienna Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics. He developed a seismometer for strong motion, and is considered the discoverer of the eponymous Conrad discontinuity in the Earth's crust. In addition, he is considered one of the founders of theoretical meteorology. From 1910 to 1918 he was a professor at the University of Czernowitz, in the 1920s he taught at the University of Vienna.

As a former member of the SDAP he was ostracized politically in the corporate state and was on leave. After the "Anschluss" of Austria in 1938, he was forced to emigrate to America. There he continued his academic career and taught 1940-1942 at New York University, then at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and since 1944 at Harvard University, where he became professor emeritus in 1951.

The Conrad Observatory on Trafelberg in Vienna is named after him, his widow Ida F. contributed financially to the realization.

Works

Victor Conrad and Leo Wenzel Pollak: Methods in Climatology. Harvard. Ed. 2, 1950; 1459 pp.