Biography

An American physicist who was co-recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of neutron-scattering techniques, in particular, neutron diffraction, a process that enabled scientists to better explore the atomic structure of matter, Clifford Shull was born on September 23, 1915,...

An Austrian-born mathematician, logician, and philosopher who obtained what may be the most important mathematical result of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German family of Rudolf Gödel (1874-1929), the manager...

A Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist who participated in the production of the first atomic bomb (1945) and who led the development of the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish...

An American engineer and teacher, co-winner (with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for their development of the transistor, a device that largely replaced the bulkier and less-efficient vacuum tube and ushered in the age of...

An Indian-born American biochemist who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that helped to show how the nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell, control the...

An American physicist who was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in both 1956 and 1972, John Bardeen was born on May 23, 1908, in Madison, Wisconsin, the U.S. He shared the 1956 prize with William B. Shockley and Walter H. Brattain for...

A physicist, the first American involved in the theoretical development of the atomic bomb, John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida on July 9, 1911, to librarians Joseph Lewis Wheeler and Mabel Archibald (Archie) Wheeler. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in...

An American scientist whose discovery in the 1940s and ’50s of mobile genetic elements, or “jumping genes,” won her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983, Barbara McClintock was born Eleanor McClintock on June 16, 1902 in Hartford, Connecticut, the third of...

A German-born American theoretical physicist who helped shape quantum physics and increased the understanding of the atomic processes responsible for the properties of matter and of the forces governing the structures of atomic nuclei, Hans Bethe was born in Strasbourg, which was then part...