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Climate researcher Friederike Otto
Photo:
Horst Friedrichs
She wasn't a good student and has no problem admitting it.
She's a professor today, so what's the point?
She was just not there enough at school, she says, she did take down the exams, and they were okay, but the oral grades couldn't have been good at all.
She lacked the high school diploma that she would have needed to study history, so her father advised her to study physics.
Why not, she thought.
She went from Kiel, where she was born and raised, to Berlin and began studying physics at the Free University as one of very few women.
She especially liked quantum physics.
A founder of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, one of the greatest German physicists of the 20th century, was convinced that physics and philosophy belong together.
Friederike Otto noticed that there was something to it, and so a path opened up for her into the sciences that should take her further and further, into climate research and from there into the heights of her subject.
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