Otto Laporte was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1902, and began his formal training under Max Born at the University of Frankfurt in 1920. In 1921, Laporte began his studies under Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich. His work in complex iron spectrum formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation which he completed in 1924. In the process of these investigations, he discovered the principle known among spectroscopists as the "Laporte rule," later known as the conservation of parity. In 1924, Laporte was awarded one of the first International Educational Board fellowships through which he spent two years at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington. Laporte began teaching physics at the University of Michigan in 1926. In 1928, 1933, and 1937, Laporte was a guest lecturer at the Imperial University in Kyoto, Japan. Some of his Japanese writing and translation can be seen in notebooks 12 and 16. In 1954-55 and again in 1961-63, Laporte served as a scientific advisor to the American ambassador in Tokyo. In 1944 he entered the field of fluid dynamics.