Karl Lark-Horovitz

Lark-Horovitz was a physicist who built Purdue University's physics department into a world center for the study of germanium, laying essential groundwork for semiconductor physics and the invention of the transistor. His wartime research on germanium detectors and purified crystals proved foundational to solid-state electronics. Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, he emigrated to the United States, where he trained a generation of semiconductor scientists.