The American physicist Walter Maurice Elsasser (1904-1991) made original contributions to geophysics and to the discussion of the physical foundations of biology.

Walter Maurice Elsasser was born in Germany on March 20, 1904. After university studies at Heidelberg and Munich he gained a doctoral degree in physics at Göttingen in 1927. His subsequent employments were diverse, in many institutions and in three countries. He worked at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin (1928-1930) and at Frankfurt University (1930-1933). While research fellow and guest lecturer at the Sorbonne (1933-1936) in Paris, his main work was in atomic physics. He immigrated to the United States in 1936 and became a naturalized citizen in 1940. In 1937 he married Margaret Trahey, and they had a daughter and a son. After a divorce from his first wife, he married Suzanne Rosenfeld in 1964.

Elsasser's first appointments in the United States were in meteorology at the California Institute of Technology...