Manfred Olson

 Guest post by Brady Steinbrecher

The subject of my work this semester is Manfred Olson and his work with our campus. The handle for my created Instagram page is physpro_olson. The included photo has been selected as the profile picture, as it is used to represent him on the planetarium website at the time of writing this. For this project, my goal is to highlight the activities on campus around the time of construction, as well as the process of the construction. This is achieved through the posting of pictures and captions depicting campus from the period, and also photos taken by Manfred Olson himself for a scrapbook that cataloged the construction of the physics building and planetarium. Manfred Olson was a physics professor on campus from 1931 to 1963. While working here he also helped with projects at the University of Chicago in the Metallurgical Laboratory in 1943 and then in Los Alamos from 1947 to 1949. He retired from teaching in 1963 to become the planetarium director, which is encapsulated in his final post on the timeline. Professor Olson was a very intelligent man who took passion in his research, but also in his teaching. He was a big advocate for UWM to get our planetarium, as he thought it would majorly change the way that we taught astronomy, and he was right. This is another aspect I attempt to convey through my posts, with the goal being to encapsulate the excitement he, along with many others on campus, must have been feeling at the time. He not only was getting his goal of the addition of a planetarium, but also a completely new and revolutionary physics building. I believe that, through my posts, the reader is able to not only view the life of Manfred Olson, but also feel his excitement for future prospects and witness his humor firsthand.