Rudolph Minkowski (born Rudolf Leo Bernhard Minkowski /mɪŋˈkɔːfski, -ˈkɒf-/;^[1] German: [mɪŋˈkɔfski]; May 28, 1895 – January 4, 1976) was a German-American astronomer.^[2]

Minkowski was the son of Marie Johanna Siegel and physiologist Oskar Minkowski.^[4][5] His uncle was Hermann Minkowski, a mathematician and one of Einstein's teachers in Zürich. Rudolph studied supernovae and, together with Walter Baade, divided them into two classes (Type I and Type II) based on their spectral characteristics.^[6] He and Baade also found optical counterparts to various radio sources.

He headed the National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a photographic atlas of the entire northern sky (and south to declination -22°) down to an apparent magnitude of 22.^[2]

Together with Albert George Wilson, he co-discovered the near-Earth Apollo asteroid 1620 Geographos in 1951,^[7] and he also discovered Planetary Nebula M2-9. He additionally discovered a correlation between the luminosity of early-type galaxies and their velocity dispersion,^[8] which was later quantified by Faber and Jackson. He won the Bruce Medal in 1961.^[2] The lunar crater Minkowski is named after him and his uncle. In the 1940's he created a catalog of nearly 200 planetary nebulae, including Minkowski 2-9,^[9] and a dwarf galaxy near NGC 541, known as Minkowski's object, is named after him.^[10]

• Minkowski, R (1960), "International Cooperative Efforts Directed Toward Optical Identification of Radio Sources", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., vol. 46, no. 1 (published Jan 1960), pp. 13–9, Bibcode:1960PNAS...46...13M, doi:10.1073/pnas.46.1.13, PMC 284999, PMID 16590587

Nebulae discovered by Minkowski:

• Hen 2-437
• M2-42
• M4-18

• Short Biography Archived 2019-11-02 at the Wayback Machine
• Rudolph Minkowski — Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences