Karapetoff was born in
Saint Petersburg,
Russian Empire in 1876. He was the son of Nikita Ivanovich Karapetov and Anna Joakimovna Karapetova. Karapetoff first studied at
Petersburg State University of Means of Communication taking his first certification in 1897 and a second in 1902. 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. In 1899, he went to the
Technische Hochschule Darmstadt to study power systems, he wrote
Über Mehrphasige Stromsysteme in 1900. In 1902, Karapetoff emigrated to the United States and apprenticed at
Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. The following year he began his long association with
Cornell University as professor of electrical engineering. Karapetoff published the first part of his
Engineering Applications of Higher Mathematics in 1911, and followed with parts two to five in 1916. That year he also published
Electrical Measurements and Testing, Direct and Alternating Current. The
American Institute of Electrical Engineers made him a
Fellow in 1912. He became a
charter member of the
American Association of University Professors in 1915. Karapetoff was a research editor for
Electrical World from 1917 to 1926. As a member of the
Socialist Party of America, Karapetoff ran for the
New York State Senate in 1910; and for
New York State Engineer and Surveyor in the State elections of
1914,
1920 and
1924. Karapetoff wrote several articles on
special relativity to show that :much of the difficulty in understanding the subject lies in the popular effort to reconcile relativity with our every-day experience. Once this non-technical point of view, with its childish illustrations and analogs, has been abandoned, and the relativity space is considered mathematically
per se, the treatment is not different from any other branch of mathematics. Certain postulates are made and a structure is built step by step on these, using mathematical logic and its recognized tools and operations. 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). In the later articles he used instead the
hyperbolic angle u called
rapidity in relativity, and determined by tanh
u =
v/c. As explained in a footnote on page 73 of the 1936 article, when sin α = tanh
u, one says that α is the
Gudermannian angle of
u, and
u is the anti-Gudermannian of α. Thus he explains, "the present treatment is in terms of the anti-Gudermannian of the velocity angle previously used." The diagrammatic treatments given by Karapetoff are frequently called
Minkowski diagrams in physical science. In 1930 he gave the first published statement of the
Aufbau principle that describes the
electron configurations of atoms (although
Erwin Madelung had discovered it in 1926, Madelung did not publish until 1936). In 1928 the
Franklin Institute awarded him the
Elliott Cresson Medal. Karapetoff was an accomplished
cellist, and in 1934 was awarded an
honorary doctorate in music by the
New York College of Music. On November 25, 1936, he married
Rosalie Margaret Cobb at
Dobbs Ferry, New York. The
Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute bestowed on him the degree of
Doctor of Science in 1937. Karapetoff died in 1948, and is buried in
Ithaca,
Tompkins County, New York. In his honor, since 1992
Eta Kappa Nu has celebrated significant work of electrical engineers with the
Vladimir Karapetoff Outstanding Technical Achievement Award. ==Articles==