19 Facts About Walter Lewin

Walter Hendrik Gustav Lewin was born on January 29,1936 and is a Dutch astrophysicist and retired professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Walter Lewin has received awards for teaching and is known for his lectures on physics and their publication online via YouTube, MIT OpenCourseWare and edX.

Walter Lewin was a child when Nazi Germany occupied The Netherlands during World War II.

Walter Lewin's mother was left to raise the children and run a small school she and her husband had started together.

Walter Lewin taught high school physics while studying for his PhD, then he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January 1966 as a post-doctoral associate, and was appointed an assistant professor.

Walter Lewin was promoted to associate professor of physics in 1968 and to full professor in 1974.

At MIT, Lewin joined the X-ray astronomy group and conducted all-sky balloon surveys with George W Clark.

Walter Lewin was co-investigator on the Small Astronomy Satellite 3 project.

Walter Lewin directed the burst observations and discovered several X-ray bursters, among them was the rapid burster which can produce thousands of X-ray bursts in one day.

Walter Lewin's group discovered that the rapid burster produces two types of bursts and established a classification of bursts as type I and type II.

Walter Lewin was co-principal investigator on High Energy Astronomy Observatory 1 HEAO-1, which has yielded the first all sky catalog at high-energy X rays.

Walter Lewin was closely involved in ROSAT observations of the nearby galaxies M31 and Messier 81.

Walter Lewin collaborated with his close friend Jan van Paradijs of the University of Amsterdam from 1978 until van Paradijs' death.

Walter Lewin became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993 and a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1993.

Walter Lewin has published about 450 scientific articles as of 2014.

Walter Lewin was the only MIT faculty member to make it to that list.

Each lecture features a selection of physics demonstrations that Walter Lewin has used in his lectures at MIT.

Inside Higher Ed reported that this learner was one of at least 10 female students to whom Walter Lewin had sent inappropriate messages, which MIT confirmed.

Walter Lewin has published about 450 scientific articles, below are a selected few.