Vladimir Karapetoff

During his studies he was a consultant to the Russian government and served as an instructor teaching electrical engineering and hydraulics in three of Saint Petersburg's colleges.

[1] In 1899, he went to the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt to study power systems, he wrote Über Mehrphasige Stromsysteme in 1900.

The following year he began his long association with Cornell University as professor of electrical engineering.

Karapetoff wrote several articles on special relativity to show that In the first three articles in the journal of the Optical Society of America (1924-1929), Karapetoff used the notion of a "velocity angle" α which expressed the relation of a velocity v to the speed of light by sin α = v/c (an equivalent definition was used before in 1921 by Paul Gruner while developing symmetric Minkowski diagrams).

[8] In his honor, since 1992 Eta Kappa Nu has celebrated significant work of electrical engineers with the Vladimir Karapetoff Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.