Rolf Riekher hat uns leider am 6. August im Alter von 98 Jahren
verlassen. Ich hatte das Glück, ihn in den letzten Jahren noch
einige male in Berlin zu besuchen. Unvergessen sind die Nachmittage
mit Kaffee und Apfelkuchen und seine spannenden Geschichten zu
Fraunhofer, Reichenbach und Liebher. Ein sehr liebenswerter Mensch
hat uns da verlassen.
Ich möchte hier einen kurzen Nachruf von Wolfgang Dick einstellen,
welcher heute im rete Netzwerk veröffentlicht wurde.
"I regret to have to inform you that the famous optician, historian of
astronomy and especially astronomical optics Rolf Riekher died on August 6th
in his house in Berlin.
Riekher was born on May 13, 1922 in Schwerin, Germany. Here he
completed his training as an optician and became interested in
photography. From 1946 he built up an optical grinding shop in Schwerin
for the production of spectacle lenses and in 1951 he went to the
optical laboratory of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which had been
founded shortly before. Until his retirement in 1987, he worked as
department head at the Central Institute of Optics and Spectroscopy of
the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. Here he developed the world's first
wearable variable-focus spectacles in 1953 and worked on aspherical
optics, infrared Fourier spectroscopy, aspherical focusing systems, etc.
Riekher was involved with the history of optics, especially the
telescope, at an early stage. The book "Fernrohre und ihre Meister",
Berlin 1957, 2nd revised edition Berlin 1990, which has become a
standard work, bears witness to this. In addition, he wrote numerous
articles on the history of optics, on optical research institutes of the
Academy of Sciences of the GDR and edited e.g. the optical works of
Johannes Kepler.
In recent decades, Riekher has been primarily concerned with the
development of optics in Joseph von Fraunhofer's circle. In addition, a
book of his photographs taken at the Schwerin Theater in the 1940s,
which represent an important document of theater history, was published
in 2019.
His transkriptions of Georg Reichbach's correspondence will appear this
year in the book series "Acta Historica Astronomiae".
A detailed laudation in German was published in 2007 in the Festschrift
"Der Meister und die Fernrohre" (preprint version available at
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253380517).
Kind regards,
Wolfgang Dick"
