Antoni Kazimierz Oppenheim

Antoni Kazimierz Oppenheim (born August 11, 1915 in Warsaw , † January 12, 2008 in Kensington , California ) was a Polish-American aeronautical engineer and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley .

Life

After finishing school, Oppenheim began studying aeronautical engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology in 1933 . After the beginning of the Second World War he fled to Great Britain via various countries , where he joined the Polish Army in Exile in 1940. In 1942 he continued his studies in London . In 1945 he was able to finish his studies with degrees from the Technical University of Warsaw, the University of London and Imperial College . In the last years of the war and in the first post-war years, he was particularly concerned with improving the performance of piston engines and the detonation and combustion processes in gas turbines . In 1948 he left Great Britain and went to Stanford University , where he was an assistant professor of mechanical engineering . In 1950 he went to the University of California at Berkeley , where he became a full professor in 1958.

Oppenheim made important contributions to the theoretical understanding of detonation and combustion processes as well as to their experimental analyzes. He was an honorary doctor of several universities and a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers . Since 1978 he was a member of the National Academy of Engineering . The Polish Academy of Sciences , he belonged to an external member.

literature

• Robert F. Sawyer: Antoni K. Oppenheim, 1915-2008 . In: National Academy of Engineering (ed.): Memorial Tributes. National Academy of Engineering . tape 13 . The National Academies Press, Washington, DC 2010, ISBN 978-0-309-14225-0 , pp. 191-193 ( online ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Antoni Kazimierz Oppenheim in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary from the University of Berkeley
• Antoni K. Oppenheim - Entry at the National Academy of Engineering