Bothe, Walther Wilhelm Georg 1891-1957
German physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Oranienburg, Brandenburg, he was educated under Max Planck at the University of Berlin, where he received his PhD in 1914. From 1934 he was head of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research at Heidelberg. He developed an electric circuit to replace the laborious process of counting scintillations by eye used by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. He also developed the coincidence technique which allowed two particles to be associated with each other, and used this to study cosmic rays and nuclear physics, showing that the recoil electron and scattered photon appear simultaneously in Compton scattering. His work on the development of the coincidence technique in counting processes brought him the Nobel Prize for physics in 1954, shared with Max Born.