Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911 - September 1, 1988), experimental physicist and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley.
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Walter Alvarez (b. October 3, 1940), professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, Berkeley.
His grandson and great-grandson have also become well known: Luis Walter Alvarez, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner; and Walter Alvarez, Professor of Geology at the University of California, Berkeley.
1980 — Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel propose the Alvarez hypothesis, that a comet or asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago causing the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, including the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, and enriching the iridium in the K–T boundary.
Alvarez and his father Luis W. Alvarez are most widely known for their discovery (with Frank Asaro and Helen Michel) that a clay layer occurring right at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary was highly enriched in the element iridium.
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His grandfather was the famed physician Walter C. Alvarez and his great-grandfather, Spanish-born Luis F. Alvarez, worked as a doctor in Hawaii and developed a method for the better diagnosis of macular leprosy.
:For his grandson, the American geology professor, see Walter Alvarez.
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Alvarez was married to the former Harriet Skidmore Smythe and the couple had four children: Gladys, Luis, Robert and Bernice.
Walter Scott | Sir Walter Scott | Walter Cronkite | Walter Raleigh | Walter Benjamin | Walter Mondale | Walter Matthau | Walter Gropius | Walter Hamma | Walter Savage Landor | Walter Burley Griffin | Walter Payton | Walter | Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba | Bruno Walter | Walter Winchell | Walter Crane | Walter Rilla | Walter Koenig | Walter Brennan | Walter Sickert | Walter Pidgeon | Walter Isaacson | Walter Damrosch | Walter Crickmer | Walter Brueggemann | Walter Reed | Walter Browne | Little Walter | Walter Runciman, 1st Viscount Runciman of Doxford |
Clemens' research supports a view contrary to the more familiar Alvarez hypothesis model of sudden catastrophic extinction precipitated by an asteroid, which was proposed in part by Walter Alvarez, also at the University of California, Berkeley, at the time.