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- Abraham Seidenberg
- Academic Press
- Albert Overhauser
- Albert Sabin
- Alberto Calderón
- Alexander Rich
- Alfred Sturtevant
- Alfred Y. Cho
- Algebraic geometry
- Allan McLeod Cormack
- Allan R. Sandage
- Allen Newell
- Alma mater
- Amnon Yariv
- Andreas Acrivos
- Andrew Viterbi
- Andrew Wiles
- Andrey Kolmogorov
- André Weil
- Ann M. Graybiel
- Anne Anastasi
- Anthony Fauci
- Antoni Zygmund
- Arie Jan Haagen-Smit
- Arnold O. Beckman
- Arthur Kornberg
- Arthur L. Schawlow
- Atle Selberg
- B. F. Skinner
- Barbara McClintock
- Barry Mazur
- Baruj Benacerraf
- Belarus
- Bernard M. Oliver
- Berni Alder
- Bert W. O'Malley
- Berta Scharrer
- Birational geometry
- Blowing up
- Bradley Efron
- Britton Chance
- Bruce Ames
- Bruno B. Rossi
- C. B. van Niel
- C. Kumar N. Patel
- Calvin F. Quate
- Carl Djerassi
- Carl Ludwig Siegel
- Carl R. de Boor
- Carl S. Marvel
- Carl Woese
- Charles H. Townes
- Charles Keeling
- Charles S. Draper
- Charles Yanofsky
- Chen Ning Yang
- Chien-Shiung Wu
- Chu Ching-wu
- Clarence L. Johnson
- Claude E. Shannon
- Cohomology
- Commutative algebra
- D. Allan Bromley
- Daniel C. Drucker
- Daniel Gorenstein
- Daniel I. Arnon
- Daniel Kleppner
- Daniel Nathans
- Darleane C. Hoffman
- David B. Mumford
- David Baltimore
- David G. Nathan
- David J. Wineland
- David Mumford
- Dennis Sullivan
- Dense
- Detlev Bronk
- Doctoral advisor
- Don L. Anderson
- Donald C. Spencer
- Donald Henderson
- Donald J. Cram
- Donald Knuth
- Donald L. Katz
- Donald Van Slyke
- Dudley R. Herschbach
- E. Bright Wilson
- E. Donnall Thomas
- E. Margaret Burbidge
- E. O. Wilson
- Earl R. Parker
- Earl Reece Stadtman
- Ed Stone
- Edmund F. Robertson
- Edward B. Lewis
- Edward F. Knipling
- Edward H. Heinemann
- Edward M. Purcell
- Edward Teller
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- Edwin H. Land
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- Edwin N. Lightfoot
- Efraim Racker
- Elaine Fuchs
- Eleanor J. Gibson
- Eli Ruckenstein
- Elias J. Corey
- Elias M. Stein
- Elizabeth C. Crosby
- Elizabeth F. Neufeld
- Elkan Blout
- Elvin A. Kabat
- Emmett N. Leith
- Ennio de Giorgi
- Eric Kandel
- Ernest R. Davidson
- Ernst Mayr
- Erwin Chargaff
- Erwin Wilhelm Müller
- Esther M. Conwell
- Eugene M. Shoemaker
- Eugene Parker
- Eugene Wigner
- Evelyn M. Witkin
- F. Albert Cotton
- Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
- Federigo Enriques
- Felix Browder
- Folke K Skoog
- Francesco Severi
- Francis Peyton Rous
- Francis S. Collins
- Francisco J. Ayala
- Frank H. Westheimer
- Frank Press
- Frederick Reines
- Frederick Rossini
- Frederick Seitz
- Frederick Terman
- Friedrich Hirzebruch
- Fritz Albert Lipmann
- G. Brent Dalrymple
- G. Evelyn Hutchinson
- G. Ledyard Stebbins
- Gabor A. Somorjai
- Galois theory
- Gary Becker
- Gene Likens
- George C. Pimentel
- George Dantzig
- George E. Mueller
- George Emil Palade
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- George Low
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- George Pake
- George S. Hammond
- George Stigler
- George Uhlenbeck
- George W. Housner
- George Wetherill
- Gertrude B. Elion
- Gilbert F. White
- Gilbert Stork
- Glenn T. Seaborg
- Glenn W. Burton
- Gordon H. Bower
- Gregory Breit
- Grigory Margulis
- Guido Castelnuovo
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- Hallowell Davis
- Hans A. Bethe
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- Hans Lewy
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- Harland G. Wood
- Harold Clayton Urey
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- Herman Feshbach
- Herman Goldstine
- Herman Mark
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- Hillel Furstenberg
- Horace Barker
- Horace Crane
- Howard L. Bachrach
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- Hyman Bass
- Iacopo Barsotti
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- Imperial Russia
- Irvin Cohen
- Isabella L. Karle
- Isadore Singer
- Israel Gelfand
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- Jack Steinberger
- Jacob Bjerknes
- Jacques Tits
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- James Cronin
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- James E. Darnell
- James E. Gunn
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- James L. Flanagan
- James V. Neel
- Jan D. Achenbach
- Janet Rowley
- Jared Diamond
- Jay Laurence Lush
- Jean Leray
- Jean-Pierre Serre
- Jeremiah P. Ostriker
- Jerzy Neyman
- Jesse Beams
- Joan A. Steitz
- Joanna S. Fowler
- JoAnne Stubbe
- John A. Wheeler
- John Bardeen
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- John G. Trump
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- Joseph B. Keller
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- Lennart Carleson
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- Mathematical Reviews
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- Maurice Ewing
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- Ray W. Clough
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- Rita Levi-Montalcini
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- Robert A. Weinberg
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- Rome
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- Russian Empire
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Belarus
Belarus (
i/bɛləˈruːs/ bel-ə-ROOSS; Belarusian: Беларусь, Russian pronunciation: [bʲɛlaˈrusʲ] Russian: Беларусь, Белоруссия, Belarus', Belorussiya), officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno (Hrodna), Gomel (Homiel), Mogilev (Mahilyow) and Vitebsk (Vitsebsk). Over forty percent of its 207,600 square kilometres (80,200 sq mi) is forested, and its strongest economic sectors are agriculture and manufacturing.
Until the 20th century, the lands of modern-day Belarus belonged to several countries, including the Principality of Polotsk, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Empire. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Belarus became a founding constituent republic of the Soviet Union and was renamed as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). The borders of Belarus took their modern shape in 1939 when some lands of the Second Polish Republic were incorporated into it after the Soviet invasion of Poland. The nation and its territory were devastated in World War II, during which Belarus lost about a third of its population and more than half of its economic resources. The republic was redeveloped in the post-war years. In 1945 the Belorussian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations, along with the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR.
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Harvard University
Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.
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MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States).
The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT published under its own name a lecture series entitled Problems of Atomic Dynamics given by the visiting German physicist and later Nobel Prize winner, Max Born. Six years later, MIT's publishing operations were first formally instituted by the creation of an imprint called Technology Press in 1932. This imprint was founded by James R. Killian, Jr., at the time editor of MIT's alumni magazine and later to become MIT president.
Technology Press published eight titles independently, then in 1937 entered into an arrangement with John Wiley & Sons in which Wiley took over marketing and editorial responsibilities. In 1962 the association with Wiley came to an end after a further 125 titles had been published. The press acquired its modern name after this separation, and has since functioned as an independent publishing house.
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Rome
Rome (/ˈroʊm/; Italian: Roma pronounced [ˈroːma] (
listen); Latin: Rōma) is a city and special comune ("Roma Capitale") in Italy. Rome is the capital of Italy and the capital of Lazio (Latin: Latium). With 2.8 million residents in 1,285.3 km2 (496.3 sq mi), it is also the country's largest and most populated comune and fourth-most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. Between 3.2 and 3.7 million people live in the Rome metropolitan area. The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.
Rome's history spans two and a half thousand years. It was the capital city of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, which was the dominant power in Western Europe and the lands bordering the Mediterranean for over seven hundred years from the 1st century BC until the 7th century AD and the city is regarded as one of the birthplaces of western civilization. Since the 1st century AD Rome has been the seat of the Papacy and, after the end of Byzantine domination, in the 8th century it became the capital of the Papal States, which lasted until 1870. In 1871 Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1946 that of the Italian Republic.
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Russian Empire
The Russian Empire (Pre-reform Russian orthography: Россійская Имперія, Modern Russian: Российская Империя, translit: Rossiyskaya Imperiya) was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the short-lived Russian Republic, which was succeeded by the Soviet Union. It was one of the largest empires in world history, surpassed in landmass only by the British and Mongol empires: at one point in 1866, it stretched from eastern Europe across Asia and into North America.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian Empire extended from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea on the south, from the Baltic Sea on the west to the Pacific Ocean and into North America on the east. With 125.6 million subjects registered by the 1897 census, it had the third largest population of the world at the time, after Qing China and the British Empire. Like all empires, it represented a large disparity in economic, ethnic and religious positions. Its government, ruled by the Emperor, was the last absolute monarchy in Europe at the time of its demise.
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United States
The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
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Abel Wolman
Abel Wolman (June 10, 1892 – February 22, 1989) was an American inventor, scientist, professor and pioneer of modern sanitary engineering. His work in supplying clean water spanned eight decades.
Wolman was born, grew up, was educated, lived and died in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from the Baltimore City College in 1909, got a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1913 and then a B.S. in engineering from Hopkins in 1915. From 1914 to 1939, Wolman worked for the Maryland State Department of Health, serving as Chief Engineer from 1922 to 1939. It was during his early years there that he made his most important contribution. Working in cooperation with chemist Linn Enslow, he standardized the methods used to chlorinate Baltimore's drinking-water supply. His efforts there helped develop the plan for Baltimore's water supply so thoroughly and effectively that it remains well-provided for growth through the 21st century. His work also benefited water systems in New York, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio. A collection of his writings has been published: Water, Health and Society, Selected Papers.
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Abraham Seidenberg
Abraham Seidenberg (June 2, 1916 – May 3, 1988) was an American mathematician.
Seidenberg was born on June 2, 1916 in Washington D.C.. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Maryland in 1937. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1943. His Ph.D. thesis was Valuation Ideals in Rings of Polynomials in Two Variables.
Seidenberg became an instructor in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1945. He reached the rank of full professor in 1958. He retired from Berkeley in 1987.
Seidenberg was known for his research to commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, differential algebra, and the history of mathematics. He published Prime ideals and integral dependence written jointly with I S Cohen which greatly simplified the existing proofs of the going-up and going-down theorems of ideal theory. He also made important contributions to algebraic geometry. In 1950, he published a paper called The hyperplane sections of normal varieties which has proved fundamental in later advances. In 1968, he wrote Elements of the theory of algebraic curves, a book on algebraic geometry. He published several important papers.
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Albert Overhauser
Albert W. Overhauser (August 17, 1925 – December 10, 2011) was an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his theory of dynamic nuclear polarization, also known as the Overhauser Effect.
Born in San Diego, California, Overhauser attended high school in San Francisco at Lick-Wilmerding High School and began his undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley in 1942. He interrupted his studies during World War II for a two year stint in the U.S. Navy Reserve, then returned to Berkeley to complete his education. In 1948 he received undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics, and in 1951 he received a Ph.D. in physics.
From 1951 to 1953, he was a post-doctoral student at the University of Illinois, where he developed an important theory on the transfer of spin polarization; once the theory had been confirmed and demonstrated by other scientists, it became known as the Overhauser Effect. He was on the faculty at Cornell University from 1953 to 1958, and then left to join the research staff at Ford Motor Company. Overhauser remained at Ford until 1973, when he joined the faculty at Purdue University. He remained at Purdue as the Stuart Distinguished Professor of Physics for the rest of his career. Overhauser died in 2011 in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was 86.
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Albert Sabin
Albert Bruce Sabin (August 26, 1906 – March 3, 1993) was an American medical researcher best known for having developed an oral polio vaccine.
Sabin was born in Białystok, Poland, to Jewish parents, Jacob and Tillie Saperstein. In 1921 he immigrated with his family to America. In 1930 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States and changed his name to Sabin.
Sabin received a medical degree from New York University in 1931. He trained in internal medicine, pathology and surgery at Bellevue Hospital in New York City from 1931-1933. In 1934 he conducted research at The Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine in England, then joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University). During this time he developed an intense interest in research, especially in the area of infectious diseases. In 1939 he moved to Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. During World War II he was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and helped develop a vaccine against Japanese encephalitis. Maintaining his association with Children's Hospital, by 1946 he had also become the head of Pediatric Research at the University of Cincinnati. At Cincinnati's Children's Hospital, Sabin supervised the fellowship of Robert M. Chanock, whom he called his "star scientific son."
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Alberto Calderón
Alberto Pedro Calderón (September 14, 1920 – April 16, 1998) was an Argentine mathematician best known for his work on the theory of partial differential equations and singular integral operators, and widely considered as one of the 20th century's most important mathematicians. He was born in Mendoza, and died in Chicago.
Calderón graduated in civil engineering from the University of Buenos Aires in 1947 and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1950.
In 1958 Calderón published one of his most important results, on uniqueness of solution of the Cauchy problem for partial differential equations. With his Ph.D. supervisor and mentor Antoni Zygmund he formulated the Calderón–Zygmund lemma of singular integral operators. At MIT, he supervised the dissertations of Irwin S. Bernstein, among others.
During his career he held academic posts at Ohio State University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, from which he retired in 1985. He was awarded many prizes for his work including the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1975, the Wolf Prize in 1989, and the National Medal of Science in 1991. Calderón has an Erdős number of 3.
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Alexander Rich
Alexander Rich, MD (American; born 15 November 1924 in Hartford, Connecticut) is a biologist and biophysicist. He is the William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics at MIT (since 1958) and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Rich earned both an A.B. (magna cum laude) and an M.D. (cum laude) from Harvard University. He was a post-doc of Linus Pauling along with James Watson. He has over 600 publications to his name.
Rich is married to Jane Erving Rich and they have four chilren: Benjamin E., Josiah D., Rebecca B., Jessica J.
Rich is the founder of Alkermes and has been its director since 1987. Dr. Rich is Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of Repligen Corporation, a biopharmaceutical company. He is also a member of the Board of Directors for Profectus BioSciences, Inc. He also serves on the editorial board of Genomics and the Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics.
In 1963, Rich discovered polysomes: clusters of ribosomes which read one strand of mRNA simultaneously.
In 1979, Rich and co-workers at MIT grew a crystal of Z-DNA. This was the first crystal structure of any form of DNA. After 26 years of attempts, Rich et al. finally crystallised the junction box of B- and Z-DNA. Their results were published in an October 2005 Nature journal. Whenever Z-DNA forms, there must be two junction boxes that allow the flip back to the canonical B-form of DNA.
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Alfred Sturtevant
Alfred Henry Sturtevant (November 21, 1891 – April 5, 1970) was an American geneticist. Sturtevant constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1913. Throughout his career he worked on the organism Drosophila melanogaster with Thomas Hunt Morgan. By watching the development of flies in which the earliest cell division produced two different genomes, he measured the embryonic distance between organs in a unit which is called the sturt in his honor. In 1967, Sturtevant received the National Medal of Science.
Alfred Henry Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, United States on November 21, 1891, the youngest of Alfred Henry and Harriet Sturtevant's six children. His grandfather Julian M. Sturtevant, a Yale University graduate, founded Illinois College where his father taught mathematics.
When Sturtevant was seven years old, his father quit his teaching job and moved the family to Alabama to pursue farming. Sturtevant attended a one room schoolhouse until entering high school in Mobile. In 1908, he enrolled at Columbia University. During this time, he lived with his older brother Edgar, a linguist, who taught nearby. Edgar taught Alfred about scholarship and research.
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Allan McLeod Cormack
Allan MacLeod Cormack (February 23, 1924 – May 7, 1998) was a South African-born American physicist who won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Godfrey Hounsfield) for his work on X-ray computed tomography (CT).
Cormack was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He attended the Rondebosch Boys' High School in Cape Town, where he was active in the debating and tennis teams. He received his B.Sc. in physics in 1944 from the University of Cape Town and his M.Sc. in crystallography in 1945 from the same institution. He was a research student at Cambridge University from 1947–49, and while at Cambridge he met his future wife, Barbara Seavey, an American physics student.
After marrying Seavey, he returned to the University of Cape Town in early 1950 to lecture. Following a sabbatical at Harvard in 1956-57, the couple agreed to move to the United States, and Cormack became a professor at Tufts University in the fall of 1957. Cormack became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966. Although he was mainly working on particle physics, Cormack's side interest in x-ray technology led him to develop the theoretical underpinnings of CT scanning. This work was initiated at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital in early 1956 and continued briefly in mid-1957 after returning from his sabbatical. His results were subsequently published in two papers in the Journal of Applied Physics in 1963 and 1964. These papers generated little interest until Hounsfield and colleagues built the first CT scanner in 1971, taking Cormack's theoretical calculations into a real application. For their independent efforts, Cormack and Hounsfield shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was member of the International Academy of Science. In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.
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Allen Newell
Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert A. Simon). He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their basic contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
Newell completed his Bachelor's degree from Stanford in 1949. He was a graduate student at Princeton University during 1949-1950, where he studied mathematics. Due to his early exposure to a new field known as game theory and the experiences from the study of mathematics, he was convinced that he would prefer "a combination of experimental and theoretical research to pure mathematics" (Simon). Soon after, he left Princeton and joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica where he worked for "a group that was studying logistics problems of the Air Force" (Simon). His work with Joseph Kruskal led to the creation of two theories: A Model for Organization Theory and Formulating Precise Concepts in Organization Theory. Newell eventually earned his PhD from the now Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon with Herbert Simon serving as his advisor.
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Amnon Yariv
Amnon Yariv (born 1930) is an Israeli-American professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Caltech, known for innovations in optoelectronics.
In 2010, Yariv was selected as a winner of the National Medal of Science for "scientific and engineering contributions to photonics and quantum electronics that have profoundly impacted lightwave communications and the field of optics as a whole." He has also been selected to receive the IEEE Photonics Award for 2011.
Yariv has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1991. In 1985 he was awarded the Harold Pender Award by the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 he was awarded the Harvey Prize by the Technion in Haifa, Israel, for "Pioneering contributions to opto-electronics, wave propagation in crystals and nonlinear and phase conjugate optics, and his demonstration of semiconductor-based integrated optics technology leading to the development of high-speed and stable solid state lasers."
Yariv has authored several texts on optical electronics and photonics. He has said that the highlight of his group's work was the invention of the semiconductor distributed feedback laser, a device widely used in the Internet's fiber-optic communications.
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Andreas Acrivos
Andreas Acrivos (born 13 June 1928) is the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Engineering, Emeritus at the City College of New York. He is also the Director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physicochemical Hydrodynamics.
Born in Athens, Greece, Acrivos moved to the United States to pursue an engineering education. He received a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University in 1950, a Master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1951, and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1954; all in chemical engineering.
Acrivos is considered to be one of the great fluid dynamicists of the 20th century. In 1954 Acrivos joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1962, he moved to Stanford University where he helped Professor David Mason build one of the world's finest chemical engineering programs. In 1987 Acrivos joined as the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Engineering at The City College of the City University of New York, a chair vacated by the death of renowned fluid dynamicist Benjamin Levich.
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Andrew Viterbi
Andrew James Viterbi (born Andrea James Viterbi; March 9, 1935) is an Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc.
Viterbi was born in Bergamo, Italy to Jewish parents and emigrated with them in 1939 to the United States as a refugee. His original name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents changed it to Andrew, since Andrea is a female name in many English-speaking countries.
Viterbi attended the Boston Latin School, and then entered MIT in 1952, studying electrical engineering. He received both BS and MS in Electrical Engineering in 1957 from MIT.
He worked at Raytheon and later at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he started working on telemetry for guided missiles, also helping to develop the phase-locked loop. Simultaneously, he was carrying out a PhD study at the University of Southern California, where he graduated in 1963 in digital communications.
After receiving his Ph.D., he applied successfully for an academic position at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
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Andrew Wiles
Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS (born 11 April 1953) is a British mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University, specializing in number theory. He is most famous for proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
Wiles is the son of Maurice Frank Wiles (1923–2005), the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Patricia Wiles (née Mowll). His father worked as the Chaplain at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, for the years 1952–55. Wiles was born in Cambridge, England, in 1953, and he attended King's College School, Cambridge, and The Leys School, Cambridge.
Wiles discovered Fermat's Last Theorem on his way home from school when he was 10 years old. He stopped by his local library where he found a book about the theorem. Puzzled by the fact that the statement of the theorem was so easy that he, a ten-year old, could understand it, he decided to be the first person to prove it. However, he soon realized that his knowledge of mathematics was too small, so he abandoned his childhood dream, until 1986, when he heard that Ribet had proved Serre's ε-conjecture and therefore established a link between Fermat's Last Theorem and the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture.
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Andrey Kolmogorov
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Russian: Андре́й Никола́евич Колмого́ров) (25 April 1903 – 20 October 1987) was a Soviet mathematician, preeminent in the 20th century, who advanced various scientific fields, among them probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics and computational complexity.
Kolmogorov was born at Tambov in 1903. His unwed mother died in childbirth and he was raised by his aunts in Tunoshna near Yaroslavl at the estate of his grandfather, a wealthy nobleman. His father, an agronomist by trade, was deported from Saint-Petersburg for participation in the revolutionary movement. He disappeared and was presumed to have been killed in the Russian Civil War.
Kolmogorov was educated in his aunt's village school, and his earliest literary efforts and mathematical papers were printed in the school newspaper. As an adolescent he designed perpetual motion machines, concealing their (necessary) defects so cleverly that his secondary-school teachers could not discover them. In 1910, his aunt adopted him and then they moved to Moscow, where he went to a gymnasium, graduating from it in 1920.
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André Weil
André Weil (6 May 1906 – 6 August 1998) (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃dʁe vɛj]) was an influential mathematician of the 20th century, renowned for the breadth and quality of his research output, its influence on future work, and the elegance of his exposition. He is especially known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was a founding member and the de facto early leader of the influential Bourbaki group. The philosopher Simone Weil was his sister.
He was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. His only sibling was Simone Weil, a famous philosopher. Weil studied in Paris, Rome and Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1928. While in Germany, he befriended Carl Ludwig Siegel. He spent two academic years at Aligarh Muslim University from 1930. Hinduism and Sanskrit literature were his life-long interests[citation needed]. After one year in Marseille, he taught six years in Strasbourg. He married Éveline in 1937.
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Anne Anastasi
Anne Anastasi (December 19, 1908 – May 4, 2001) was an American psychologist best known for her pioneering development of psychometrics. Her seminal work, Psychological Testing, remains a classic text in which she drew attention to the individual being tested and therefore to the responsibilities of the testers. She called for them to go beyond test scores, to search the assessed individuals’ history to help them to better understand their own results and themselves.
Known as the “test guru,” Anastasi focused on what she believed to be the appropriate use of psychometric tests. As stated in an obituary, “She made major conceptual contributions to the understanding of the manner in which psychological development is influenced by environmental and experiential factors. Her writings have provided incisive commentary on test construction and the proper application of psychological tests.”. According to Anastasi, such tests only revealed what the test-taker knows at the time; they did not explain test scores. In addition, any psychometric measurement must take into account that aptitude is context-dependent. Anastasi stressed the importance of the role of the tester to correctly select, conduct, and evaluate tests.
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Anthony Fauci
Anthony S. Fauci (born: December 24, 1940) is an immunologist who has made substantial contributions to research in the areas of AIDS and other immunodeficiencies, both as a scientist and as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Anthony Stephen Fauci was born on December 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York, to Stephen A. Fauci, a pharmacist, and Eugenia A. Fauci, a homemaker. He graduated from Regis High School in New York City. He went on to attend the College of the Holy Cross and received his M.D. from Cornell University Medical College in 1966. He then completed an internship and residency at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.
In 1968, he came to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI) in NIAID. In 1974, he became Head of the Clinical Physiology Section, LCI, and in 1980 was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation, a position he still holds. In 1984, he became Director of NIAID, which has the responsibility for an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research on infectious and immune-mediated illnesses.
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Antoni Zygmund
Antoni Zygmund (December 25, 1900 – May 30, 1992) was a Polish mathematician. He is considered one of the greatest analysts of the 20th century. His main area of interest was harmonic analysis.
Born in Warsaw, Zygmund obtained his PhD from Warsaw University (1923) and became a professor at Stefan Batory University at Wilno (1930–39). In 1940, during the World War II occupation of Poland, he emigrated to the United States and became a professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. From 1945 until 1947 he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and from 1947 at the University of Chicago.
He was a member of several scientific societies. From 1930 until 1952 he was a member of the Polish Society of Friends of Science (TNW), from 1946 a member of the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU), from 1959 a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and from 1961 a member of the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C.. In 1986 he received the National Medal of Science.
His main interest was harmonic analysis. He wrote a standard two-volume work Trigonometric Series. His students included Alberto Calderón, Paul Cohen, Nathan Fine, Józef Marcinkiewicz, Victor L. Shapiro, and Elias Stein. He died in Chicago.
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Arthur Kornberg
Arthur Kornberg (March 3, 1918 – October 26, 2007) was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)" together with Dr. Severo Ochoa of New York University. He was also awarded the Paul-Lewis Laboratories Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1951, L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva University in 1962, as well as National Medal of Science in 1979.
His primary research interests were in biochemistry, especially enzyme chemistry, deoxyribonucleic acid synthesis (DNA replication) and studying the nucleic acids which control heredity in animals, plants, bacteria and viruses.
Born in New York City, Arthur Kornberg was the son of Jewish parents Joseph and Lena Kornberg who emigrated to New York from Austrian Galicia (now part of Poland) in 1900 before they were married. His paternal grandfather had changed the family name from Queller (also spelled Kweller) to avoid the draft by taking on the identity of someone who had already completed military service. Joseph Kornberg married Lena Katz in 1904. He worked as a sewing machine operator in the sweat shops of the Lower East side of New York for almost 30 years, and when his health failed, opened a small hardware store in Brooklyn, where Arthur assisted customers at the age of nine. Joseph spoke at least six languages although he had no formal education.
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Atle Selberg
Atle Selberg (14 June 1917 – 6 August 2007) was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory, and in the theory of automorphic forms, in particular bringing them into relation with spectral theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950.
Selberg was born in Langesund, Norway. While he was still at school he was influenced by the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan and he discovered the exact analytical formula for the partition function as suggested by the works of Ramanujan; however, this result was first published by Hans Rademacher. During the war he fought against the German invasion of Norway, and was imprisoned several times. He studied at the University of Oslo and completed his Ph.D. in 1943.
During World War II, Selberg worked in isolation due to the German occupation of Norway. After the war his accomplishments became known, including a proof that a positive proportion of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the line Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Re(s)=\tfrac{1}{2} .
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Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992), the 1983 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, was an American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927, where she was a leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. The field remained the focus of her research for the rest of her career. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. Her work was groundbreaking: she developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas, including genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome with physical traits, and demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized amongst the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.
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Barry Mazur
Barry Charles Mazur (born December 19, 1937) is an influential mathematician and professor at Harvard.
Born in New York City, Mazur attended the Bronx High School of Science and MIT, although he did not graduate from the latter on account of failing a then-present ROTC requirement. Regardless, he was accepted for graduate school and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1959, becoming a Junior Fellow at Harvard from 1961 to 1964. He is currently the Gerhard Gade University Professor and a Senior Fellow at Harvard. In 1982 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Mazur has received the Veblen Prize in geometry, the Cole Prize in number theory, the Chauvenet Prize for exposition, and the Steele Prize for seminal contribution to research from the American Mathematical Society.
His early work was in geometric topology. In a clever, elementary fashion, he proved the generalized Schoenflies conjecture (his complete proof required an additional result by Marston Morse), around the same time as Morton Brown. Both Brown and Mazur received the Veblen Prize for this achievement. He also discovered the Mazur manifold and the Mazur swindle.
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Baruj Benacerraf
Baruj Benacerraf (October 29, 1920 – August 2, 2011) was a Venezuelan-born American immunologist, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the "discovery of the major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface protein molecules important for the immune system's distinction between self and non-self". His colleagues and shared recipients were Jean Dausset and George Davis Snell.
Benacerraf was born in Caracas, Venezuela on October 29, 1920 to Sephardic Jewish parents. His parents were Moroccan. His brother is well-known philosopher Paul Benacerraf. Benacerraf moved to Paris from Venezuela with his family in 1925. After going back to Venezuela, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1940. In 1942 he earned his B.S. at Columbia University School of General Studies. He then went on to attain the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the Medical College of Virginia, the only school to which he was accepted.
From his autobiography at nobelprize.org,
After his medical internship and US Army service (1945–48), and working at the military hospital of Nancy, he became a researcher at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (1948–50). He performed research in Paris (1950–56), relocated to New York University (1956–68), moved to the National Institutes of Health (1968–70), then joined Harvard University medical school (1970–91) where he became the Fabyan Professor of comparative Pathology, concurrently serving the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston (1980). He began studies of allergies in 1948, and discovered the Ir (immune response) genes that govern transplant rejection (1960s). Counting different editions, he is an author of over 300 books and articles
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Berni Alder
Berni Julian Alder (born 1925 in Germany) is an American physicist specialized in statistical mechanics, and a pioneer of numerical simulation in physics.
Alder was born as a Swiss citizen in Germany. After the Nazis came to power, he moved to Switzerland, and to the United States in 1941 with his family in Switzerland, where he attended the University of California at Berkeley. He was interrupted by the World War II and went into the Navy. After he came back to Berkeley, he got a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1946 and a master's degree in chemical engineering in 1947. He went to the California Institute of Technology to study under John Gamble Kirkwood for his PhD in 1948 and worked for the investigation of phase transitions in hard-sphere gas with Stan Frankel, where he got the idea to use the Monte Carlo method. After he finished at Caltech in 1952, he went to Berkeley and worked part time at Berkeley to teach chemistry and part time as a consultant under suggestion of Edward Teller in the nuclear weapons program for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to help with the equations of state. In collaboration with Thomas Everett Wainwright, he developed techniques for molecular dynamics simulation in the mid-1950s, including the liquid-solid phase transition for hard sphere and the velocity autocorrelations function decay in liquids.
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Berta Scharrer
Berta Vogel Scharrer (December 1, 1906 – July 23, 1995) was a German-born American scientist who helped to found the scientific discipline now known as neuroendocrinology.
Scharrer's studies of invertebrates, particularly the cockroach, was so extensive that her name was given to an entire species of cockroach, known as the Escala scharrerae, found in Australasia.
Berta Vogel was born in Munich, Germany, to Johanna Weiss Vogel and Karl Phillip Vogel, who served as vice-president of the federal court of Bavaria. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Munich. She worked at the university with Prof. Karl von Frisch, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his work with bees. Berta Scharrer was forced to emigrate at the onset of the Holocaust. She arrived with her husband, Ernst Scharrer, in the United States with a total of eight dollars. Despite discrimination against women scientists at the time she eventually got a professorship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a branch of Yeshiva University, in September 1955.
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Bradley Efron
Bradley Efron (born May 24, 1938) is an American statistician best known for proposing the bootstrap resampling technique, which has had a major impact in the field of statistics and virtually every area of statistical application. The bootstrap was one of the first computer-intensive statistical techniques, replacing traditional algebraic derivations with data-based computer simulations.
Efron was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in May 1938, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Esther and Miles Efron. He attended the California Institute of Technology, graduating in Mathematics in 1960. He arrived at Stanford in fall of 1960, earning his Ph.D., under the direction of Rupert Miller and Herb Solomon, in the Department of Statistics. While at Stanford, he was suspended for a year for his involvement with the Stanford Chaparral's parody of Playboy magazine.
He is currently a Professor of Statistics at Stanford. At Stanford he has been the Chair of the Department of Statistics, Associate Dean of Science, Chairman of the University Advisory Board, Chair of the Faculty Senate and Chair of the Undergraduate Program in Applied Mathematics.
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Britton Chance
Britton Chance (July 24, 1913 – November 16, 2010) was the Eldridge Reeves Johnson University Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Biophysics, as well as Professor Emeritus of Physical Chemistry and Radiological Physics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
At the 1952 Summer Olympics, Chance won a gold medal in sailing.
Chance was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. (1935), M.A. (1936) and Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry 1940 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of St. Anthony Hall. He earned a second Ph.D. at Cambridge University in 1942 in Biology/Physiology. During World War II, Chance worked for the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which was working on the development of radar. In 1952 he received his D.Sc. from Cambridge. His research interests were diverse. He was promoted as the Professor of Biophysics at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and appointed the second director of the Johnson Foundation, a position he held until 1983. He was then appointed E. R. Johnson Professor of Biophysics and Physical Biochemistry (later renamed as Biochemistry and Biophysics) in 1964 and University Professor in 1977.
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Bruce Ames
Bruce Nathan Ames (born December 16, 1928) is an American biochemist. He is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds.
Dr Ames was born and raised in New York City. He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. His undergraduate studies were at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his graduate studies were completed at the California Institute of Technology.
Ames was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1970.
He is a recipient of the Bolton S. Corson Medal in 1980, Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1985, the Japan Prize in 1997, the National Medal of Science in 1998 and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal in 2004, among many others.
His research focuses on cancer and aging and he has authored over 500 scientific publications. He is among the few hundred most-cited scientists in all fields.
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Carl Djerassi
Carl Djerassi (born October 29, 1923, Vienna) is an Austrian-American chemist, novelist, and playwright best known for his contribution to the development of oral contraceptive pills (OCPs). Djerassi is emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University.
He participated in the invention in 1951, together with Mexican Luis E. Miramontes and Hungarian George Rosenkranz, of the progestin norethindrone—which, unlike progesterone, remained effective when taken orally and was far stronger than the naturally occurring hormone. His preparation was first administered as an oral contraceptive to animals by Gregory Pincus and Min Chueh Chang and to women by John Rock. Djerassi remarked that he did not have birth control in mind when he synthesized norethisterone—"not in our wildest dreams… did we imagine (it)".
Djerassi is also the author of several novels in the "science-in-fiction" genre, including Cantor's Dilemma, in which he explores the ethics of modern scientific research through his protagonist, Dr. Cantor.
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Carl Ludwig Siegel
Carl Ludwig Siegel (December 31, 1896 – April 4, 1981) was a German mathematician specialising in number theory and celestial mechanics. He was one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century.
Siegel was born in Berlin, where he enrolled at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1915 as a student in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Amongst his teachers were Max Planck and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, whose influence made the young Siegel abandon astronomy and turn towards number theory instead. His best student was Jürgen Moser, one of the founders of KAM theory (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser), which lies at the foundations of chaos theory. Another notable student was Kurt Mahler, the number theorist.
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Carl Woese
Carl Richard Woese (
/ˈwoʊz/; born July 15, 1928 in Syracuse, New York) is an American microbiologist and physicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea (a new domain or kingdom of life) in 1977 by phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique pioneered by Woese and which is now standard practice. He was also the originator of the RNA world hypothesis in 1977, although not by that name. He currently holds the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and is professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Woese attended Deerfield Academy. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Amherst College in 1950 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Yale University in 1953. In 1964, Woese joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Having defined Archaea as a new domain, Woese redrew the taxonomic tree. His three-domain system, based on genetic relationships rather than obvious morphologic similarities, divided life into 23 main divisions, incorporated within three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya. Archaea are neither bacteria nor eukaryotes. They can be viewed as prokaryotes that are not bacteria.
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Charles Yanofsky
Charles Yanofsky (born April 17, 1925) is a leading American geneticist.
Born in New York, Yanofsky studied at the City College of New York and at Yale University.
In 1964, Yanofsky and colleagues established that gene sequences and protein sequences are colinear: changes in DNA sequence can produce changes in protein sequence at corresponding positions. His work has revealed how controlled alterations in RNA structure allow RNA to serve as a regulatory molecule in both bacterial and animal cells.
Yanofsky was awarded the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and was co-recipient of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1976 with Seymour Benzer. Yanofsky was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1985 and was one of the recipients of the 2003 National Medal of Science awards.
Charles Yanofsky is now the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Molecular Biology (Emeritus) at Stanford University.
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Chen Ning Yang
Chen-Ning Franklin Yang (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng) (born October 1, 1922) is a Chinese-American physicist who works on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He and Tsung-dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction. Yang became a United States citizen in 1964.
Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui, China; his father Yang Ko-Chuen (Chinese: 楊武之; pinyin: Yáng Wǔzhī) (1896–1973) was a mathematician and his mother Luo Meng-hua (羅孟華) was a housewife. Yang attended elementary and high school in Beijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after the Japanese invaded China. In 1938 they moved to Kunming, Yunnan, where the National Southwestern Associated University was located. In the same year, as a second year student, Yang passed the entrance examination and studied at the National Southwestern Associated University. He received his bachelor's degree in 1942, the thesis being about the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Wu Ta-you (吴大猷) (1907–2000). He continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision of Wang Chu-hsi (王竹溪) (1911–1983), working on statistical mechanics. In 1944 he received his master's degree was awarded a scholarship known as the Boxer Indemnity (Chinese: 庚子賠款; pinyin: Gēngzǐ péikuǎn), a scholarship set up by the United States government using the funds raised from the money China was forced to pay out following the Boxer Rebellion. He was delayed for one year, during which time he taught in a middle school as a teacher and studied field theory.
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Daniel Gorenstein
Daniel E. Gorenstein (January 1, 1923 – August 26, 1992) was an American mathematician. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1950 under Oscar Zariski, introducing in his dissertation Gorenstein rings. He worked on commutative algebra, and then was a major influence on the classification of finite simple groups.
After teaching mathematics to military personnel at Harvard before earning his doctorate, Gorenstein held posts at Clark University and Northeastern University before he began teaching at Rutgers University in 1969, where he remained for the rest of his life.In 1981 he collaborated with Pierre Deligne and Piotr Blass. He was the founding director of DIMACS in 1989, and remained as its director until his death.
Gorenstein was awarded many honors for his work on finite simple groups. He was recognised, in addition to his own research contributions such as work on signalizer functors, as a leader in putting together the classification proof, the largest collaborative piece of pure mathematics ever attempted. In 1972 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar; in 1978 he gained membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1989 won the Steele Prize for mathematical exposition.
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Daniel Kleppner
Daniel Kleppner, born 1932, is the Lester Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Physics at MIT and co-director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. He is the winner of the 2005 Wolf Prize in Physics [1], and the 2007 Frederic Ives Medal. Prof. Kleppner has also been awarded the National Medal of Science (2006). Together with Robert J. Kolenkow, he authored a popular introductory mechanics textbook for advanced students. Kleppner graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in 1953, Cambridge University with a B.A. in 1955, and Harvard University with a Ph.D. in 1959.
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Daniel Nathans
Daniel Nathans (October 30, 1928 – November 16, 1999) was an American microbiologist.
He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. During the Great Depression his father lost his small business and was unemployed for a long period of time. Nathans went to public schools and then to the University of Delaware, where he studied chemistry, philosophy, and literature. He received his M.D. degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1954. Nathans served as President of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1995 to 1996.
Along with Werner Arber and Hamilton Smith, Nathans received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978 for the discovery of restriction enzymes. He was also awarded with National Medal of Science in 1993.
In 1999, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine announced the creation of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine that was named in his honor posthumously along with Victor McKusick [1]. In 2005, the School of Medicine named one of its four colleges after Dr. Nathans.
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David Baltimore
David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist, university administrator, and Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He served as president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1997 to 2006, and is currently the Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at Caltech. He also served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.
Baltimore was born to Gertrude Lipschitz and Richard Baltimore in New York City. He graduated from Great Neck High School in 1956, and credits his interest in biology to a high-school summer spent at the Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor, Maine. He earned a BA at Swarthmore College in 1960, and received his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in 1964. After postdoctoral fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a non-faculty research position at the Salk Institute, he joined the MIT faculty in 1968. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.
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David Mumford
David Bryant Mumford (born 11 June 1937) is an American mathematician known for distinguished work in algebraic geometry, and then for research into vision and pattern theory. He won the Fields Medal and was a MacArthur Fellow. In 2010 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. He is currently a University Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.
Mumford was born in Worth, West Sussex in England, of an English father and American mother. His father William started an experimental school in Tanzania and worked for the then newly created United Nations.
In high school, he was a finalist in the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search. After attending the Phillips Exeter Academy, Mumford went to Harvard, where he became a student of Oscar Zariski. At Harvard, he became a Putnam fellow in 1955 and 1956. He completed his Ph.D. in 1961, with a thesis entitled Existence of the moduli scheme for curves of any genus.
He met his first wife, Erika Jentsch, at Radcliffe College. After Erika died in 1988, he married his second wife, Jenifer Gordon.
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Dennis Sullivan
Dennis Parnell Sullivan (born February 12, 1941) is an American mathematician. He is known for work in topology, both algebraic and geometric, and on dynamical systems. He holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and is a professor at Stony Brook University.
He received his B.A. in 1963 from Rice University and his doctorate in 1966 from Princeton University. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled Triangulating homotopy equivalences, was written under the supervision of William Browder, and was a major contribution to surgery theory. He was a permanent member of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 1974 to 1997.
Sullivan is one of the founders of the surgery method of classifying high-dimensional manifolds, along with Browder, Sergei Novikov and C. T. C. Wall. In homotopy theory, Sullivan put forward the radical concept that spaces could directly be localised, a procedure hitherto applied to the algebraic constructs made from them. He founded (along with Daniel Quillen) rational homotopy theory.
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Detlev Bronk
Detlev Wulf Bronk (August 13, 1897 – November 17, 1975) was President of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1949 to 1953 and President of the National Academy of Sciences from 1950 to 1962. Bronk is credited with reshaping the postwar university environment at Hopkins. While at Hopkins, he unsuccessfully attempted to revive the "Goodnow Plan" but succeeded in acquiring the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
From 1953–1968 Bronk was president of The Rockefeller University. (The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was renamed The Rockefeller University in 1965). He firmly espoused academic freedom and resisted attempts by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy to have Johns Hopkins University dismiss Professor Owen Lattimore. The same year he was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. He was credited with formulating the modern theory of the science of biophysics. Bronk was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 14, 1964. He was also a member of the National Aeronautics and Space council. He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Brookhaven National Laboratories and a founder and President of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS). He was also an advisory member of the Atomic Energy Commission. He served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1965–1967. Bronk is quoted as saying:
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Donald Henderson
Donald Ainslie Henderson, known as D.A. Henderson, (born September 7, 1928) is an American physician and epidemiologist, who headed the international effort during the 1960s to eradicate smallpox. As of 2010[update], he is a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Biosecurity and a professor of public health and medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Service Professor and Dean Emeritus of the School of Public Health, with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology.
Henderson was born in Lakewood, Ohio in the United States. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1950 and received his M.D. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine in 1954. He served both an internship (1954–1955) and a residency (1957–1959) in medicine at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, New York. He earned an M.P.H. degree in 1960 from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health).
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Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth ( /kəˈnuːθ/kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.
He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process he also popularized the asymptotic notation.
In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science, Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces.
As a writer and scholar, Knuth created the WEB/CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MIX/MMIX instruction set architectures.
Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, where he enrolled, earning achievement awards. He applied his intelligence in unconventional ways, winning a contest when he was in eighth grade by finding over 4,500 words that could be formed from the letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar." The judges had only about 2,500 words on their master list. This won him a television set for his school and a candy bar for everyone in his class.
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Donald Van Slyke
Donald Dexter Van Slyke (March 29, 1883 – May 4, 1971) was a renowned Dutch American biochemist. His achievements included the publication of 317 journal articles and 5 books, as well as numerous awards, among them the National Medal of Science and the first AMA Scientific Achievement Award.
Van Slyke was born in Pike, New York on March 29, 1883. He completed his BA in 1905 and PhD in 1907 both at the University of Michigan, his father's alma mater. His PhD studies were performed under Moses Gomberg.
Van Slyke took up a post-doctoral position at the Rockefeller Institute in 1907, under Phoebus Levene. Levene also arranged for him to spend one year in Berlin under Hermann Emil Fischer in 1911. His early work focused on determining the amino acid composition of proteins. A major achievement during this time was the discovery of the amino acid hydroxylysine.
In 1914, Van Slyke was appointed chief chemist of the newly founded Rockefeller Institute Hospital, where he played a key part in developing the field of clinical chemistry. His work focused especially on the measurement of gas and electrolyte levels in tissues, for which he is considered to be one of the founders of modern quantitative blood chemistry. He is also considered by many to have first popularised the term "clinical chemistry" in his two-volume work Quantitative Clinical Chemistry, co-published with John P. Peters. The two-volume work was widely accepted in the medical world as the "Bible" of quantitative clinical chemistry. During this period, he also served as managing editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry from 1914 to 1925.
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Earl Reece Stadtman
Earl Reece Stadtman (1919–2008) was an American biochemist, notable for his research of enzymes and anaerobic bacteria. Stadtman received National Medal of Science from President Jimmy Carter in 1979 "for seminal contributions to understanding of the energy metabolism of anaerobic bacteria and for elucidation of major mechanisms whereby the rates of metabolic processes are finely matched to the requirements of the living cell". Stadtman was Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the National Heart Institute. Stadtman was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The Washington Post called Stadtman a "revered biochemist".
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Edward Teller
Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", even though he claimed he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Fermi's theory of beta decay (in the form of the so-called Gamow–Teller transitions) provided an important stepping stone in the applications of this theory. The Jahn–Teller effect and the BET theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis and Marshall Rosenbluth, Teller co-authored a paper which is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics.
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Edward Witten
Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently a professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Witten is a researcher in superstring theory, a theory of quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories and other areas of mathematical physics.
He has made contributions in mathematics and helped bridge gaps between fundamental physics and various areas of mathematics. In 1990 he was the world's first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Union of Mathematics. In 2004, Time magazine stated that Witten was widely thought to be the world's greatest living theoretical physicist.
Witten was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the son of Lorraine W. Witten and Louis Witten, a theoretical physicist specializing in gravitation and general relativity.
Witten attended the Park School of Baltimore (class of '68), and received his Bachelor of Arts with a major in history and minor in linguistics from Brandeis University in 1971. He published articles in The New Republic and The Nation. In 1968 Witten published an article in The Nation arguing that the New Left had no strategy. He worked briefly for George McGovern, a Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern lost the election in a landslide to Richard Nixon.
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Efraim Racker
Efraim Racker (June 28, 1913 – September 9, 1991) was an Austrian biochemist who was responsible for identifying and purifying Factor 1 (F1), the first part of the ATP synthase enzyme to be characterised. F1 is only a part of a larger ATP synthase complex known as Complex V. It is a peripheral membrane protein attached to component Fo, which is integral to the membrane.
Efraim Racker was born to a Jewish family in 1913 in Neu Sandez, Poland (then Austrian Galicia), but he grew up in Vienna. His elder brother, Heinrich Racker, was to become a famous psychoanalyst. Efraim Racker was studying medicine at the University of Vienna when Hitler invaded in 1938. Racker fled to Great Britain, where he took a job in a mental hospital in Wales. His research focused on the biochemical causes for mental diseases. During the war, Racker was given the opportunity to practice medicine, but he decided to move to the United States to continue his research.
In the U.S., he accepted a position as a research associate in physiology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis from 1941 to 1942. While investigating the biochemical basis for brain diseases, he discovered that the polio virus inhibited glycolysis in the brains of mice. He eventually left his research position for a job as a physician at the Harlem Hospital in New York City. In 1944 he became an associate professor of microbiology at the New York University Medical School, where he continued his work on glycolysis.
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Elaine Fuchs
Elaine V. Fuchs (born 1950) is an American cell biologist, famous for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases, and has led the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs also pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which assess protein function first and then assesses its role in development and disease. In particular, Fuchs researches skin stem cells, and their production of hair and skin. She is currently the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development at Rockefeller University.
Fuchs grew up outside Chicago, in a family of scientists—her father, aunt, and sister were also scientists, and her family encouraged her to pursue higher education.
Fuchs earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1972 from the University of Illinois, graduating with highest distinction in the Chemical Sciences. She began as one of only three women in an undergraduate physics class of 200. Fuchs was politically active during college, protesting the Vietnam War and applying to the Peace Corps. However, when she was assigned to Uganda, then under the dictatorship of Idi Amin, she elected to go directly to graduate school instead.
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Eli Ruckenstein
Dr Eli Ruckenstein is a Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. His main research areas are catalysis, surface phenomena, colloids and emulsions, and bio-compatible surfaces and materials.
He received his PhD from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in 1949. He started his academic career as an Assistant Professor with his alma mater. In 1969, he was invited to spend six weeks in London at the University College and Imperial College. After this he received an invitation as National Science Foundation Senior Scientist at Clarkson College. Subsequently in 1970, he joined the University of Delaware as a Full Professor. He then joined University at Buffalo (UB) in 1973.
Now at more than 80 years of age he is still works as full time member of the UB faculty, and continues to conduct original research and publish peer-reviewed journal articles at a rate well above the average.
Ruckenstein is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. Among the most prominent of these are his induction into the National Academy of Engineering in 1990, and his award in 1998 of the National Medal of Science, which is the highest scientific honor bestowed by the United States.
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Elkan Blout
Elkan R. Blout (July 2, 1919 – December 20, 2006) was a Professor of biochemistry at Harvard University. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1969. In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Science “For his pioneering studies of protein conformation and devotion to the scientific enterprise of the Nation.” He died of pneumonia in 2006. He is buried on Cuttyhunk Island.
http://www.fa.hms.harvard.edu/about-our-faculty/memorial-minutes/b/elkan-blout/
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Ennio de Giorgi
Ennio de Giorgi (Lecce, February 8, 1928 – Pisa, October 25, 1996) was an Italian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and the foundations of mathematics.
He solved Bernstein's problem about minimal surfaces.
He solved 19th Hilbert problem on the regularity of solutions of elliptic partial differential equations.
-dimensionale in uno spazio ad r dimensioni (On a general theory of Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): (r-1) -dimensional measure in Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): r -dimensional space)" (in Italian), Annali di Matematica Pura e Applicata, IV 36 (1): 191–213, DOI:10.1007/BF02412838, MR 0062214, Zbl 0055.28504, http://www.springerlink.com/content/6452044r330m1739/?p=366525395f0443be9a9565849f3fa2f4&pi=0 . The first complete exposition by De Giorgi of the theory of Caccioppoli sets.
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Eric Kandel
Eric Richard Kandel (born November 7, 1929 in Vienna, Austria) is an American neuropsychiatrist who was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.
Kandel, who had studied psychoanalysis, wanted to understand how memory works. His mentor, Harry Grundfest, said, “If you want to understand the brain you’re going to have to take a reductionist approach, one cell at a time.” So he studied the neural system of a simple animal, Aplysia, a snail with very large nerve cells.
Kandel is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was also the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia. Kandel authored In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (WW Norton), which chronicles his life and research. The book was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology.
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Ernst Mayr
Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904 – February 3, 2005) was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.
Neither Charles Darwin nor anyone else in his time knew the answer to the species problem: how multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for the concept of species. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. When populations within a species become isolated by geography, feeding strategy, mate selection, or other means, they may start to differ from other populations through genetic drift and natural selection, and over time may evolve into new species. The most significant and rapid genetic reorganization occurs in extremely small populations that have been isolated (as on islands).
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Erwin Chargaff
Erwin Chargaff (Czernowitz, August 11, 1905 – New York City, USA, June 20, 2002) was an Austrian biochemist who immigrated to the United States during the Nazi era and was a Professor of biochemistry at Columbia University medical school[citation needed]. Through careful experimentation, Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
Chargaff had one son, Thomas, with his wife Vera Broido, whom he married in 1928. Chargaff became an American citizen in 1940.
Chargaff was born in Czernowitz on August 11, 1905, Bukowina, Austria, which is now Chernovtsy, Ukraine.[citation needed]
From 1924 to 1928, Chargaff studied chemistry in Vienna, receiving a doctorate. From 1928 to 1930, Chargaff served as the Milton Campbell Research Fellow in organic chemistry at Yale University, but he did not like New Haven, Connecticut. Chargaff returned to Europe, where he lived from 1930 to 1934, serving first as the assistant in charge of chemistry for the department of bacteriology and public health at the University of Berlin (1930–1933), and then, being forced to resign his position in Germany, as a result of the Nazi policies, as a research associate at the Pasteur Institute in Paris (1933–1934).[citation needed]
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Erwin Wilhelm Müller
Erwin Wilhelm Müller (or Mueller) (June 13, 1911, in Berlin – May 17, 1977, in Washington D.C.) was a German physicist who invented the Field Emission Electron Microscope (FEEM), the Field Ion Microscope (FIM), and the Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope. He was the first person to experimentally observe atoms.
Müller studied at the Technical University in Berlin under Gustav Hertz. He received his degree in engineering in 1935 and his doctorate in 1936. Müller worked at the Siemens Research Laboratory, where he invented the field emission microscope in 1936 that allowed resolutions of 2 nanometers.
Müller married Klara Thüssing in 1939, and their only daughter Jutta was born in 1940. Due to the circumstances of war, he also worked at the Stabilovolt Company.
In 1947, he was appointed to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (renamed to Fritz-Haber-Institut on the occasion of its incorporation into the Max Planck Society in 1953) by Iwan N. Stranski. Here he developed the field ion microscope which, due to its resolution of 0.25 nm, was the first instrument used to observe atoms.
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Eugene Parker
Eugene N. Parker (born June 10, 1927) is an American solar astrophysicist who received his B.S. degree in physics from Michigan State University in 1948 and Ph.D. from Caltech in 1951. In the mid 1950s Parker developed the theory on the supersonic solar wind and predicted the Parker spiral shape of the solar magnetic field in the outer solar system. In 1987, Parker proposed that the solar corona might be heated by myriad tiny "micro-flares", miniature solar flares that occur all over the surface of the Sun.
Parker was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1967. As of early 2005, he was still engaged in active research at the University of Chicago. His daughter and son-in-law are both faculty members at Michigan State University.
Parker spent four years at the University of Utah and has been at the University of Chicago since 1955, where he has held positions in the physics department, the astronomy and astrophysics department and the Enrico Fermi Institute. He is the leading authority on the solar wind and the effects of magnetic fields in the heliosphere. His work has greatly increased understanding of the solar corona, the solar wind, the magnetic fields of both the Earth and the Sun, and their complex electromagnetic interactions. The theoretical models which he developed in part by looking at comet tails have in recent years been confirmed by spacecraft. His books, especially Cosmical Magnetic Fields, have educated generations of investigators. His most recent book includes the effects of magnetic fields of planets, stars, and galaxies on X-ray emissions.
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Eugene Wigner
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Jenő Pál; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) FRS was a Hungarian American theoretical physicist and mathematician.
He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles"; the other half of the award was shared between Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen. Wigner is important for having laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics as well as for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus. It was Eugene Wigner who first identified Xe-135 "poisoning" in nuclear reactors, and for this reason it is sometimes referred to as Wigner poisoning. Wigner is also important for his work in pure mathematics, having authored a number of theorems.
Wigner was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a middle class Jewish family. He had two sisters, one of whom later married Paul Dirac. At the age of 11, Wigner contracted what his parents believed to be tuberculosis. They sent him to live for six weeks in a sanatorium in the Austrian mountains. During this period, Wigner developed an interest in mathematical problems. From 1915 through 1919, together with John von Neumann, Wigner studied at the Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium, where they both benefited from the instruction of the noted mathematics teacher László Rátz. In 1919, to escape the Béla Kun communist regime, the Wigner family briefly moved to Austria, returning to Hungary after Kun's downfall. Partly as a reaction to the prominence of Jews in the Kun regime, the family converted to Lutheranism.
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Federigo Enriques
Federigo Enriques (5 January 1871 – 14 June 1946) was an Italian mathematician, now known principally as the first to give a classification of algebraic surfaces in birational geometry, and other contributions in algebraic geometry.
He was born in Livorno, and brought up in Pisa, in a Sephardi Jewish family of Portuguese descent. He became a student of Guido Castelnuovo, and became an important member of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. He also worked on differential geometry. He collaborated with Castelnuovo, Corrado Segre and Francesco Severi. He had positions at the University of Bologna, and then the University of Rome La Sapienza. He lost his position in 1938, when the Fascist government enacted the "leggi razziali" (racial laws), which in particular banned Jews from holding professorships in Universities.
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Felix Browder
Felix E. Browder (born July 31 1927) is a United States mathematician.
Felix Browder was a child prodigy who entered MIT in 1944 and graduated in 1946 with his first degree in Mathematics. At MIT he achieved the rank of a Putnam Fellow in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. In 1948 (at age 20), he received his doctorate from Princeton University. He is known for his research in nonlinear functional analysis, including the theory of semigroups, monotone operators, and fixed points of Cesàro sums of non-expansive operators. He is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.
Browder was the recipient of the 1999 National Medal of Science. He also served as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1999 to 2000.
Felix Browder is the brother of two other research mathematicians, William Browder (an algebraic topologist) and Andrew Browder (a specialist in function algebras). Their father, Earl Browder, was the leader of the Communist Party USA until his expulsion after World War II.
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Folke K Skoog
Folke Karl Skoog (July 15, 1908 – February 15, 2001) was a Swedish-born American plant physiologist who was a pioneer in the field of plant growth regulators, particularly cytokinins. Skoog was a recipient of the National Medal of Science.
Born in Halland, Sweden, Skoog emigrated to the United States during a trip to California in 1925, and was naturalized as a citizen almost a decade later. He competed, and finished sixth in heat 2, in the 1500 meter race during the 1932 Summer Olympics. In 1936, he received his PhD in biology from Caltech for his work done with auxin, a plant hormone.
Skoog's professional career advanced significantly with his arrival at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1947. Carlos Miller discovered kinetin in 1954, and benzyladenine and related compounds were later synthesized in Skoog's lab.
In 1962, Skoog and Toshio Murashige published what is probably the best-known paper in plant tissue culture; in a fruitless attempt to discover a yet-unknown plant growth regulator in tobacco juice for his doctoral thesis, Murashige and Skoog instead developed a greatly improved salt base for the sterile culture of tobacco. Now referred to as Murashige and Skoog medium, the final paper (Murashige, T. and Skoog, F. (1962) A revised medium for rapid growth and bioassays with tobacco tissue cultures. Physiol Plant 18: 100-127) is considered one of the most often-cited papers in biology. Now 50 years after the work, M&S salt base remains an essential component in plant tissue culture.
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Francesco Severi
Francesco Severi (13 April 1879 – 8 December 1961) was an Italian mathematician.
Severi was born in Arezzo, Italy. He is famous for his contributions to algebraic geometry and the theory of functions of several complex variables. He became the effective leader of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. Together with Federigo Enriques, he won the Bordin prize from the French Academy of Sciences.
He contributed in a major way to birational geometry, the theory of algebraic surfaces, in particular of the curves lying on them, the theory of moduli spaces and the theory of functions of several complex variables. He wrote prolifically, and some of his work has subsequently been shown to be not rigorous according to the then new standards set in particular by Oscar Zariski and David Mumford. At the personal level, according to Roth (1963) he was easily offended, and he was involved in a number of controversies. He died in Rome of cancer.
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Francis Peyton Rous
(Francis) Peyton Rous FRS (October 5, 1879 – February 16, 1970) born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1879 and received his B.A. and M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He was involved in the discovery of the role of viruses in the transmission of certain types of cancer. In 1966 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work.
As a pathologist he made his seminal observation, that a malignant tumor (specifically, a sarcoma) growing on a domestic chicken could be transferred to another fowl simply by exposing the healthy bird to a cell-free filtrate, in 1911. This finding, that cancer could be transmitted by a virus (now known as the Rous sarcoma virus, a retrovirus), was widely discredited by most of the field's experts at that time. Since he was a relative newcomer, it was several years before anyone even tried to replicate his prescient results. Although clearly some influential researchers were impressed enough to nominate him to the Nobel Committee as early as 1926 (and in many subsequent years, until he finally received the award, 40 years later—this may be a record for the time between a discovery and a Nobel Prize).
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Frank Press
Frank Press (born December 4, 1924) is an American geophysicist.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Press was science advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980, and president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences from 1981 to 1993. He is the recipient of 30 honorary degrees. Named in his honor are Mount Press, in the Ellsworth Mountains, Antarctica; and Osedax frankpressi, a species of whalebone-eating marine worm.
Press graduated with a B.S. degree from the City College of New York (1944) and completed his M.A. (1946) and Ph.D. (1949) degrees at Columbia University under Maurice "Doc" Ewing. As one of Ewing's two assistant professors, (with J. Lamar "Joe" Worzel as the other) Press was a founder of Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) in Palisades, N.Y. Originally trained as an oceanographer, Press participated in research cruises on the sailing vessels RV Vema and RV Atlantis.
In the early 1950s, Press turned to seismology, co-authoring with Ewing (who contributed only slightly) and Jardetzky a seminal monograph on elastic waves in layered media. In 1957, Press was recruited by Caltech to succeed founder Beno Gutenberg as director of the Seismological Laboratory, a position in which he remained until 1965. The appointment was controversial in that it passed over both Hugo Benioff and Charles Richter, then the laboratory's senior professors, for a much younger outsider.
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Frederick Reines
Frederick Reines (March 16, 1918 – August 26, 1998) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment, and may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties".
Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Jewish emigrants to the US from Russia and a paternal relative of the Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, as the youngest of four children. Reines and his family moved to upstate New York, where he spent much of his childhood in a small town where his father ran a country store. Looking back, Reines said: "My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including fourth of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand."
Reines was an Eagle Scout, and also participated in singing in a chorus, performing solo roles in pieces, including Händel's Messiah. He was encouraged to take lessons with a well-known voice coach at the Metropolitan Opera, where they were provided for him free of charge, since he could not afford to pay for them.
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Frederick Rossini
Frederick Dominic Rossini (1899- 1990) was an American thermodynamicist noted for his work in chemical thermodynamics.
In 1920, at the age of twenty-one, Rossini entered Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and soon was awarded a full-time teaching scholarship. He graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1925, followed by an M.S. degree in science in physical chemistry in 1926.
As a result of reading Lewis and Randall's classical 1923 textbook Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances he wrote to Gilbert N. Lewis and as a result he was offered a teaching fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. Among his teachers were Gilbert Lewis and William Giauque. Rossini's doctoral dissertation on the heat capacities of strong electrolytes in aqueous solution was supervised by Merle Randall. His Ph.D. degree was awarded in 1928, after only 21 months of graduate work, even though he continued to serve as a teaching fellow throughout this entire period.
In 1932, Frederick Rossini, Edward W. Washburn, and Mikkel Frandsen authored “The Calorimetric Determination of the Intrinsic Energy of Gases as a Function of the Pressure.” This experiment resulted in the development of the Washburn Correction for bomb calorimetry, a decrease or correction of the results of a calorimetric procedure to normal states.
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Frederick Seitz
Frederick Seitz (July 4, 1911 – March 2, 2008) was an American physicist and a pioneer of solid state physics. Seitz was president of Rockefeller University, and president of the United States National Academy of Sciences 1962–1969. He was the recipient of the National Medal of Science, NASA's Distinguished Public Service Award, and several other honors. He founded the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and several other material research laboratories across the United States. Seitz was also the founding chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a tobacco industry consultant and a prominent skeptic on the issue of global warming.
Born in San Francisco on July 4, 1911, Seitz graduated from Lick-Wilmerding High School in the middle of his senior year, and went on to study physics at Stanford University obtaining his bachelor's degree in three years, graduating in 1932. He married Elizabeth K. Marshall on May 18, 1935.
Seitz died March 2, 2008 in New York. He was survived by a son, three grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
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Frederick Terman
Frederick Emmons Terman (June 7, 1900 in English, Indiana – December 19, 1982) was an American academic. He is widely credited (together with William Shockley) with being the father of Silicon Valley.
Terman completed his undergraduate degree in chemistry and his master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University. His father Lewis Terman, the man who popularized the IQ test in America, was a professor at Stanford. Terman went on to earn an ScD in electrical engineering from MIT in 1924. His advisor at MIT was Vannevar Bush, who first proposed what became the National Science Foundation.
He returned to Stanford in 1925 as a member of the engineering faculty. From 1925 to 1941 Terman designed a course of study and research in electronics at Stanford that focused on work with vacuum tubes, circuits, and instrumentation. He also wrote Radio Engineering (first edition in 1932; second edition, much improved, in 1938; third edition in 1947 with added coverage of new technologies developed during World War II; fourth edition in 1955 with a new title, Electronic and Radio Engineering), one of the most important books on electrical and radio engineering, and to this day a good reference on those subjects. Terman's students at Stanford included Oswald Garrison Villard, Jr., William Hewlett and David Packard. He encouraged his students to form their own companies and personally invested in many of them, resulting in firms such as Litton Industries and Hewlett-Packard. Terman was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1941.
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Friedrich Hirzebruch
Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch (17 October 1927 – 27 May 2012) was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation. He has been described as "the most important mathematician in the Germany of the postwar period."
Hirzebruch was born in Hamm, Westphalia. He studied at the University of Münster from 1945–1950, with one year at ETH Zürich.
He then had a position at Erlangen, followed by the years 1952–54 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. After one year at Princeton University 1955–56, he was made a professor at the University of Bonn, where he remained, becoming director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in 1981. More than 300 people gathered in celebration of his 80th birthday in Bonn in 2007.
The Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem (1954) for complex manifolds was a major advance and quickly became part of the mainstream developments around the classical Riemann–Roch theorem; it was also a precursor of the Atiyah–Singer index theorem. Hirzebruch's book Neue topologische Methoden in der algebraischen Geometrie (1956) was a basic text for the 'new methods' of sheaf theory, in complex algebraic geometry. He went on to write the foundational papers on topological K-theory with Michael Atiyah, and collaborate with Armand Borel on the theory of characteristic classes. In his later work he provided a detailed theory of Hilbert modular surfaces, working with Don Zagier.
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Fritz Albert Lipmann
Fritz Albert Lipmann FRS (June 12, 1899 – July 24, 1986) was a German-American biochemist and a co-discoverer in 1945 of coenzyme A. For this, together with other research on coenzyme A, he was awarded half the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953 (shared with Hans Adolf Krebs).
Lipmann was born in Königsberg, Germany to a Jewish family.
Lipmann studied medicine at the University of Königsberg, Berlin, and Munich, graduating in Berlin in 1924. He returned to Königsberg to study chemistry under Professor Hans Meerwein. In 1926 he joined Otto Meyerhof at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Berlin, for his Ph.D. thesis. After that he followed Meyerhof to Heidelberg to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research.
From 1939 lived and worked in the USA. From 1949 to 1957 he was professor of biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School. From 1957 onwards, he taught and conducted research at Rockefeller University, New York City. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1966.
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Gary Becker
Gary Stanley Becker (born December 2, 1930) is an American economist. He is a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a professor at the Booth School of Business. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. He is currently a Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Becker was one of the first economists to branch into what were traditionally considered topics belonging to sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and drug addiction (see Rational addiction). He is known for arguing that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility maximizing. His approach can include altruistic behavior by defining individuals' utility appropriately. He is also among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital. Becker is also credited with the "rotten kid theorem". He is married to Guity Nashat, a historian of the Middle East whose research interests overlap his own.
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Gene Likens
Gene Elden Likens (born January 6, 1935) is an American ecologist and a leading pioneer in the study of acid rain.
Likens got his B.S. at Manchester College (North Manchester, Indiana) in 1957, and his M.S. (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He joined the faculty of Dartmouth College in 1961. He was co-founder in 1963 of a group with F. Herbert Bormann, Robert S. Pierce and Noye M. Johnson working on the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The study immediately found that the rain was abnormally acidic, and the group made one of the first scientific studies linking acid rain to air pollution such as sulphur dioxide. The group also devised a range of highly influential long-term experiments on the ecosystem scale.
In 1969, Likens joined the faculty of Cornell University. In January 1983 he was named Cornell University’s Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences. While at Cornell University, he served as Chairman of the Section of Ecology and Systematics. Currently he is an Adjunct Professor in Cornell's graduate field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
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George Dantzig
George Bernard Dantzig (November 8, 1914 – May 13, 2005) was an American mathematical scientist who made important contributions to operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics.
Dantzig is known for his development of the simplex algorithm, an algorithm for solving linear programming problems, and his work with linear programming, some years after it was invented by the Soviet mathematician & economist Leonid Kantorovich[citation needed]. In statistics, Dantzig solved two open problems in statistical theory, which he had mistaken for homework after arriving late to a lecture of Jerzy Neyman.
Dantzig was the Professor Emeritus of Transportation Sciences and Professor of Operations Research and of Computer Science at Stanford.
Born in Portland, Oregon, George Bernard Dantzig was named after George Bernard Shaw, the Irish writer.. His father, Tobias Dantzig, was a Baltic German mathematician and linguist, and his mother, Anja Dantzig (née Ourisson), was a French linguist. Dantzig's parents met during their study at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where Tobias studied mathematics under Henri Poincaré. The Dantzigs immigrated to the United States, where they settled in Portland, Oregon.
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George Emil Palade
George Emil Palade (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈd͡ʒe̯ord͡ʒe eˈmil paˈlade]; November 19, 1912 – October 8, 2008) was a Romanian cell biologist. Described as "the most influential cell biologist ever", in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, together with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology. , the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum – which he first described in 1955.
Palade also received the U.S. National Medal of Science in Biological Sciences for "pioneering discoveries of a host of fundamental, highly organized structures in living cells" in 1986, and was previously elected a Member of the US National Academy of Science in 1961.
George Emil Palade was born on November 19, 1912 in Iaşi, Romania; his father was a professor of philosophy at the University and his mother was a high school teacher. George E. Palade received his M.D. in 1940 from the Carol Davila School of Medicine, in Bucharest, Romania. He was a member of the faculty there until 1946, when he went to the United States for postdoctoral studies. There, he joined Prof. Albert Claude at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
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George Kistiakowsky
George Bogdan Kistiakowsky FRS (November 18, 1900 – December 7, 1982) (Ukrainian: Георгій Богданович Кістяківський) was a Ukrainian-American chemistry professor at Harvard who participated in the Manhattan Project and later served as President Eisenhower's Science Advisor. Born in Kiev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire (in present day Ukraine), he attended private schools in Kiev and Moscow until the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917. He then joined the anti-Communist White Army serving in the infantry and tank corps. In 1920 he escaped to Yugoslavia and then on to Germany.
George's grandfather Oleksandr Fedorovych Kistiakovsky was a professor of law and an attorney of the Russian Empire who specialized in the criminal law. Oleksandr Fedorovych was born in a family of a priest near Chernihiv. George's father Bohdan Kistiakovsky was the Ukrainian academician of law and the co-founder of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. His mother was Maria Berendshtam. George's uncle Ihor Kistiakovsky was the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian State.
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George Low
George Michael Low, born George Wilhelm Low (June 10, 1926 – July 17, 1984) was a NASA administrator and 14th President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was born near Vienna, Austria to Artur and Gertrude Burger Low, small business people in Austria. With the German occupation of Austria in 1938, four years after Artur Low's death, his family emigrated to the United States. In 1943, Low graduated from Forest Hills High School, Forest Hills, New York, and entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he joined the Delta Phi fraternity. His education was interrupted by the war and from 1944 to 1946, in which he served in the U.S. Army. While doing so, he became a naturalized American citizen, and legally changed his name to George Michael Low.
After military service Low returned to RPI and received his Bachelor of Aeronautical Engineering degree in 1948. He then worked at General Dynamics (Convair) in Fort Worth, Texas, as a mathematician in an aerodynamics group. Low returned to RPI late in 1948, however, and received his Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering in 1950. In 1949, he married Mary Ruth McNamara of Troy, New York. Between 1952 and 1963, they had five children: Mark S., Diane E., George David, John M., and Nancy A.
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George Pake
George Pake (April 1, 1924 – March 4, 2004) was a physicist and research executive primarily known for helping found Xerox PARC. Pake earned his bachelors and masters degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and his doctorate in physics at Harvard University in 1948.
A rather serious case of scoliosis kept Pake out of the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.
Pake was raised in Kent, Ohio; his father was an English instructor at Kent State University. Though he never again lived in Kent after his childhood, George Pake retained deep feeling for the city of Kent, and was pleased to be asked in later years to deliver the commencement address at Kent State.
After four years as a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Pake became the head of the physics department at age 28. He later went on to become provost of the university from 1962 to 1970 before leaving to serve as founding director of Xerox PARC.
PARC assembled a first-rate collection of research talent, especially in the area of computer science. During Dr. Pake's years running Xerox PARC, the research center invented the laser printer and pioneered the use of a computer "desktop" which functioned by clicking on "icons." This has since become the computer industry standard.
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George Stigler
George Joseph Stigler (January 17, 1911 – December 1, 1991) was a U.S. economist. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982, and was a key leader of the Chicago School of Economics, along with his close friend Milton Friedman.
While at Chicago, he was greatly influenced by Frank Knight, his dissertation supervisor. Friedman, a friend for over sixty years, comments upon it as remarkable since only three or four students ever managed to complete their PhD dissertation under Knight in his 28 years at Chicago. Jacob Viner and Henry Simons also influenced him and, among his students, W. Allen Wallis and Milton Friedman.
Stigler is best known for developing the Economic Theory of Regulation, also known as capture, which says that interest groups and other political participants will use the regulatory and coercive powers of government to shape laws and regulations in a way that is beneficial to them. This theory is a component of the public choice field of economics. He also carried out extensive research in the history of economic thought.
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George Uhlenbeck
George Eugene Uhlenbeck (December 6, 1900, Batavia, Dutch East Indies – October 31, 1988, Boulder, Colorado) was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist.
George Uhlenbeck was the son of Eugenius and Anne Beeger Uhlenbeck. He attended the Hogere Burgerschool (High School) in The Hague, from which he graduated in 1918.
Subsequently entered Delft University of Technology as a student in chemical engineering. During the next year, he transferred to the Leiden University, to study physics and mathematics, and he earned his bachelor's degree in 1920. Uhlenbeck was then admitted by Ehrenfest (a student of Boltzmann's) to the Wednesday evening physics colloquium in Leiden. Ehrenfest became the most important scientific influence in his life. From 1922 to 1925 Uhlenbeck was the tutor of the younger son of the Dutch ambassador in Rome. While there, he attended lectures by Tullio Levi-Civita and Vito Volterra and met his longtime friend, Enrico Fermi. In 1923, Uhlenbeck received his Master's degree from Leiden.
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George Wetherill
George Wetherill (August 12, 1925 -- July 19, 2006) was the Director Emeritus, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, USA.
George Wetherill benefited from the G.I. Bill to receive four degrees, the Ph. B. (1948), S.B. (1949), S.M. (1951), and Ph. D., in physics (1953), all from the University of Chicago. He did his thesis research, on the spontaneous fission of uranium, as well as nuclear processes in nature, as an U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Predoctoral Fellow. Upon receiving his Ph. D., Wetherill became a staff member at Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) in Washington, D.C. There, he joined an interdepartmental group of Carnegie scientists who were working to date the Earth's rocks by geochemical methods involving natural radioactive decay. This involved determining the concentration and isotopic composition of inert gases such as argon, as well as the isotopes of strontium and lead. He originated the concept of the Concordia Diagram for the uranium-lead isotopic system; this diagram became the standard means for determining precise ages of rocks, and of detecting the possibility of metamorphism, and it forms the basis for all high-precision geochronology in rocks dating back to the early history of the Earth. He was also a member of the Carnegie group that accurately determined the decay constants of potassium and rubidium, an effort that has also become fundamental to the measurement of geological time.
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Gilbert Stork
Gilbert Stork (born December 31, 1921) is a U.S. organic chemist. He is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Columbia University. The Stork enamine synthesis is named in his honor.
University of Florida, B.S. 1942; University of Wisconsin–Madison, PhD 1945 with Samuel M. McElvain
Prof. Stork also holds honorary doctorates from Lawrence University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Paris, the University of Rochester, and Columbia University.
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Gregory Breit
Gregory Breit (July 14, 1899, Mykolaiv – September 11, 1981, Salem, Oregon) was a Russian-born American physicist and professor at universities in New York, Wisconsin, Yale, and Buffalo. In 1921, he was Paul Ehrenfest's assistant in Leiden.
In 1925, while at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Breit joined with Merle Tuve in using a pulsed radio transmitter to determine the height of the ionosphere, a technique important later in radar development.
Together with Eugene Wigner, Breit gave a description of particle resonant states with the relativistic Breit–Wigner distribution in 1929, and with Edward Condon, he first described proton-proton dispersion. He is also credited with deriving the Breit equation
In April 1940, he proposed to the National Research Council that American scientists observe a policy of self-censorship due to the possibility of their work being used for military purposes by enemy powers in World War II.
During the early stages of the war, Breit was chosen by Arthur Compton to supervise the early design of the first atomic bomb during an early phase in what would later become the Manhattan Project. Breit resigned his position in 1942, feeling that the work was going too slowly and that there had been security breaches on the project; his job went to Robert Oppenheimer, who was later appointed to scientific director of the entire project.
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Grigory Margulis
Gregori Aleksandrovich Margulis (Russian: Григо́рий Алекса́ндрович Маргу́лис, first name often given as Gregory, Grigori or Grigory; born February 24, 1946) is a Russian mathematician known for his far-reaching work on lattices in Lie groups, and the introduction of methods from ergodic theory into diophantine approximation. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1978 and a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2005, becoming the seventh mathematician to receive both prizes. In 1991, he joined the faculty of Yale University, where he is currently the Erastus L. DeForest Professor of Mathematics.
Margulis was born in Moscow, Soviet Union. He received his PhD in 1970 from the Moscow State University, starting research in ergodic theory under the supervision of Yakov Sinai. Early work with David Kazhdan produced the Kazhdan–Margulis theorem, a basic result on discrete groups. His superrigidity theorem from 1975 clarified a whole area of classical conjectures about the characterisation of arithmetic groups amongst lattices in Lie groups.
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Guido Castelnuovo
Guido Castelnuovo (14 August 1865 – 27 April 1952) was an Italian mathematician. His father, Enrico Castelnuovo, was a novelist and campaigner for the unification of Italy. Castelnuovo is best known for his contributions to the field of algebraic geometry, though his contributions to the study of statistics and probability are also significant.
Castelnuovo was born in Venice.
After attending a grammar school at Foscarini in Venice, he went to Padua where he graduated in 1886. At the University of Padua he was taught by Giuseppe Veronese. He also achieved minor fame due to winning the university salsa dancing competition. After his graduation, he sent one of his papers to Corrado Segre, whose replies he found remarkably helpful. It marked the beginning of a long period of collaboration.
Castelnuovo spent one year in Rome to research advanced geometry. After that he was appointed as an assistant of Enrico D'Ovidio at the University of Turin, where he was strongly influenced by Corrado Segre. Here he worked with Alexander von Brill and Max Noether. In 1891 he moved back to Rome to work at the chair of Analytic and Projective Geometry. Here he was a colleague of Luigi Cremona, his former teacher, and took over his job when the later died in 1903. He also founded the University of Rome's School of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences (1927). He influenced a younger generation of Italian mathematicians and statisticians, including Corrado Gini and Francesco Paolo Cantelli.
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Hallowell Davis
Hallowell Davis (August 31, 1896 – August 22, 1992) was an American physiologist and otolaryngologist and researcher who did pioneering work on the physiology of hearing and the inner ear. He served as director of research at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, Missouri.
Hallowell Davis was born on August 31, 1896, in New York City, the son of attorney Horace A. Davis. He graduated from Harvard College in 1918, where he was the class orator at graduation.. He earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1922 and then spent a year at the University of Cambridge where he was trained as an electrophysiologist in the laboratory of Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian.
In 1925, Harvard named Davis to serve as an official tutor and instructor in pre-medical sciences, as a means of helping prepare students intending to advance to Harvard and other medical schools to "get the soundest general foundation possible for their medical education". After the year in England, he returned to teach at Harvard and became an assistant professor at Harvard College in 1927 and the school's first tutor in biochemical sciences, later becoming the director of the school's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory.
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Hans Lewy
Hans Lewy (October 20, 1904 – August 23, 1988) was an American mathematician, known for his work on partial differential equations and on the theory of functions of several complex variables.
In 1950, Lewy was fired from the University of California, Berkeley for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. He was reinstated in 1952 by the California Supreme Court case Tolman v. Underhill.
He was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland). He was awarded a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1986.
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Har Gobind Khorana
Har Gobind Khorana also known as Hargobind Khorana (Punjabi: ਹਰਿ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਖੁਰਾਨਾ ,ہار گوبند کھورانہ January 9, 1922 – November 9, 2011) was a Pakistani biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 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 cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.
He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966, and subsequently received the National Medal of Science. He served as MIT's Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry, Emeritus and was a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute.
Khorana was born to Hindu parents in British India now part of Pakistan. His father was the village "patwari" (or taxation official). He was home schooled by his father until high school. He earned his B.Sc from Punjab University, Lahore, in 1943, and his M.Sc from Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan in 1945. In 1945, he began studying at the University of Liverpool. After earning a Ph.D in 1948, he continued his postdoctoral studies in Zürich (1948–1949). Subsequently, he spent two years at Cambridge University. In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and in 1960 moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1970 Khorana became the Alfred Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked until retiring in 2007.
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Harry Eagle
Harry Eagle (born in New York City on 1905; died June 21, 1992) was an American physician and pathologist. He studied, and later worked, at Johns Hopkins University before moving on to the National Institutes of Health. From 1961 to 1988 he worked at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is best known for Eagle's minimal essential medium, which is important in understanding how human and mammalian cells reproduce. In 1973, he was a co-winner of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize. In 1987, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his work in the Biological Sciences.
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Harry Harlow
Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked for a time with him.
Harlow's experiments were controversial; they included rearing infant macaques in isolation chambers for up to 24 months, from which they emerged severely disturbed. Some researchers cite the experiments as a factor in the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States.[citation needed]
Born Harry Israel on October 31, 1905 to Mabel Rock and Alonzo Harlow Israel, Harlow grew up in Fairfield, Iowa, the second youngest of four brothers. After a year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Harlow obtained admission to Stanford University on a special aptitude test. After a semester as an English major with nearly disastrous grades, he declared himself as a psychology major.
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Hassler Whitney
Hassler Whitney (March 23, 1907 – May 10, 1989) was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, and characteristic classes.
Hassler Whitney was the son of First District New York Supreme Court judge Edward Baldwin Whitney and Josepha (Newcomb) Whitney, the grandson of Yale University Professor of Ancient Languages William Dwight Whitney, the great-grandson of Connecticut Governor and US Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, and the great-great-great-grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman.
Hassler Whitney's maternal grandparents were astronomer and celestial mechanician Simon Newcomb and Mary Hassler Newcomb (the granddaughter of the first superintendent of the Coast Survey Ferdinand Hassler).
He married Margaret R. Howell, May 30, 1930; children: James Newcomb, Carol, Marian; married Mary Barnett Garfield, January 16, 1955; children: Sarah Newcomb, Emily Baldwin; and married Barbara Floyd Osterman, February 8, 1986.
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Heisuke Hironaka
Heisuke Hironaka (広中 平祐, Hironaka Heisuke?, born 9 April 1931) is a Japanese mathematician. He once failed the entrance examination for Hiroshima University in Japan, but after one year he passed the entrance examination for Kyoto University in Japan. After completing his undergraduate studies at Kyoto University, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard while under the direction of Oscar Zariski. He won the Fields Medal in 1970.
He is celebrated for proving in 1964 that singularities of algebraic varieties admit resolutions in characteristic zero. This means that any algebraic variety can be replaced by (more precisely is birationally equivalent to) a similar variety which has no singularities.
Hironaka was for many years a Professor of mathematics at Harvard University but currently lives in Japan, where he is greatly respected and influential. He is also a professor of mathematics at Seoul National University in South Korea. He has been active in raising funds for causes such as mathematical education. He is president of the University of Creation; Art, Music & Social Work, a private university in Takasaki, Gunma, Japan.
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Helmut Landsberg
Helmut Erich Landsberg was a noted and influential climatologist. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, February 9, 1906 and died December 6, 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland while attending a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization. Landsberg was an important figure in meteorology and atmospheric science in education, public service and administration. He authored several notable works, particularly in the field of particulate matter and its influence on air pollution and human health. He is the first to write in English about the use of statistical analysis in the field of climatology and implemented such statistical analysis in aiding military operations during World War II. He received a number of significant honors during his life. Several honors are now bestowed in his name in recognition of his contributions to his field.
Landsberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt in Germany, where Beno Gutenberg was his advisor. Gutenberg was a pupil of the founder of modern seismology Emil Johann Wiechert. and served as a director of the Taunus Observatory of Geophysics and Meteorology at that university before moving to the United States in 1934 to teach geophysics and meteorology at the Pennsylvania State University. While there, he offered a graduate seminar on bioclimatic problems, the first such graduate course to be taught in the United States. He was subsequently appointed to the faculties of the University of Chicago (1941) and the University of Maryland (1967), with which he continued to work until his death. At Maryland, he served as first Director of the Graduate program in Meteorology (later named the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science), and of the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics.
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Henri Cartan
Henri Paul Cartan (July 8, 1904 – August 13, 2008) was a French mathematician with substantial contributions in algebraic topology. He was the son of the French mathematician Élie Cartan.
Cartan studied at the Lycée Hoche in Versailles, then at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, receiving his doctorate in mathematics. He taught at the University of Strasbourg from November 1931 until the outbreak of the Second World War, after which he held academic positions at a number of other French universities, spending the bulk of his working life in Paris.
Cartan is known for work in algebraic topology, in particular on cohomology operations, the method of "killing homotopy groups", and group cohomology. His seminar in Paris in the years after 1945 covered ground on several complex variables, sheaf theory, spectral sequences and homological algebra, in a way that deeply influenced Jean-Pierre Serre, Armand Borel, Alexander Grothendieck and Frank Adams, amongst others of the leading lights of the younger generation. The number of his official students was small, but includes Adrien Douady, Roger Godement, Max Karoubi, Jean-Louis Koszul, Jean-Pierre Serre and René Thom.
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Henry Eyring
Henry Eyring (February 20, 1901 – December 26, 1981) was a Mexican-born American theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates.
A prolific writer, he authored more than 600 scientific articles, ten scientific books, and a few books on the subject of science and religion. He received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1980 and the National Medal of Science in 1966 for developing the Absolute Rate Theory or Transition state theory of chemical reactions, one of the most important developments of 20th-century chemistry. Several other chemists later received the Nobel prize for work based on it, and his failure to receive the Nobel prize was a matter of surprise to many. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences apparently did not understand Eyring's theory until it was too late to award him the Nobel; the academy awarded him the Berzelius Medal in 1977 as partial compensation.Sterling M. McMurrin believed he should have received the Nobel Prize but was not awarded it because of his religion.
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Henry Stommel
Henry Melson Stommel (September 27, 1920 - January 17, 1992) was a major contributor to the field of physical oceanography. Beginning in the 1940s, he advanced theories about global ocean circulation patterns and the behavior of the Gulf Stream that form the basis of physical oceanography today. Widely recognized as one of the most influential and productive oceanographers of his time, Stommel was both a groundbreaking theoretician and an astute, seagoing observer.
Stommel was born in Wilmington, Delaware. An anomaly among modern scientists, Stommel became a full professor without an earned doctorate. He received his B.S. from Yale University (1942) and served there as instructor in mathematics and astronomy (1942–44).
A research associate at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 1944 to 1959, he became professor of oceanography at Harvard University in 1959 and moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, where he remained until 1978, returning to Woods Hole until his retirement. Stommel established the PANULIRUS station (begun in 1954) in Bermuda. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1962 and received the National Medal of Science in 1989.
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Henry Taube
Henry Taube, Ph.D, M.Sc, B.Sc, FRSC (November 30, 1915 – November 16, 2005) was a Canadian-born American chemist noted for having been awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He was the first Canadian-born chemist to win the Nobel Prize. Taube completed his undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, and his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. After finishing graduate school, Taube worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taube also received many other major scientific awards, including the Priestley Medal in 1985 and two Guggenheim Fellowships early in his career (1949 and 1955), as well as numerous honorary doctorates. His research focused on redox reactions, transition metals and the use of isotopically labeled compounds to follow reactions. He had over 600 publications including one book, and had mentored over 200 students during his career. Taube and his wife Mary had three children, his son Karl is an anthropologist at the University of California Riverside.
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Herbert Friedman
Herbert Friedman (June 21, 1916 – September 9, 2000) was an American pioneer in the application of sounding rockets to solar physics, aeronomy, and astronomy. He was also a statesman and public advocate for science. During his lifetime, he was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the National Medal of Science, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society, the William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union, the Wolf Foundation Prize in Physics, and the Albert A. Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1972), among others. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1960 and of the American Philosophical Society in 1964.
Friedman was born June 21, 1916 in Brooklyn, New York (USA) the second of three children of Samuel and Rebecca Friedman. His father was an Orthodox Jew who moved to New York City from Evansville, Indiana, and eventually established a successful art framing shop on East Ninth Street in Manhattan. Friedman’s mother was born in eastern Europe. Friedman grew up as an aspiring artist and earned pocket money as a young man from the sale of his sketches. He entered Brooklyn College in 1932 as an art major, but ended up with a degree in physics. He was influenced by his first physics professor, Dr. Bernhard Kurrelmeyer, who eventually helped him get a scholarship to Johns Hopkins.
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Herman Feshbach
Herman Feshbach (February 2, 1917, in New York City — 22 December, 2000, in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American physicist. He was an Institute Professor Emeritus of physics at MIT. Feshbach is best known for Feshbach resonance and for writing, with Philip M. Morse, Methods of Theoretical Physics.
Feshbach was born in New York City and graduated from the City College of New York in 1937. He then went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1942.
Feshbach was invited to stay at MIT after he received his doctorate. He remained on the physics faculty for over fifty years. From 1967 to 1973, he was the director of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics, and from 1973 to 1983, he was chairman of the physics department. In 1983, Feshbach was named as an Institute Professor, the highest faculty honor at MIT.
Prof. Feshbach was active in the nuclear disarmament movement and was a founder and first chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. In 1969, he participated in a protest against military research at MIT.
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Herman Goldstine
Herman Heine Goldstine (September 13, 1913 – June 16, 2004) was a mathematician and computer scientist, who was one of the original developers of ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers.
Herman Heine Goldstine was born in Chicago in 1913. He attended the University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree Mathematics in 1933, a master's degree in 1934 and a PhD. in 1936. For three years he was a research assistant under Gilbert Ames Bliss, an authority on the mathematical theory of exterior ballistics. In 1939 Goldstine began a teaching career at the University of Michigan, until the United States' entry into World War II when he joined the Army. In 1941 he married Adele Katz who was an ENIAC programmer and wrote the technical description for ENIAC. He had a daughter and a son with Adele who died in 1964. Two years later he married Ellen Watson.
In retirement Goldstine became executive director of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia between 1985 and 1997 where he was able to attract many prestigious visitors and speakers.
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Hillel Furstenberg
Hillel (Harry) Furstenberg (Hebrew: הלל (הארי) פורסטנברג) (born September 29, 1935) is an American-Israeli mathematician, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups. He gained attention at an early stage in his career for producing an innovative topological proof of the infinitude of prime numbers. He proved unique ergodicity of horocycle flows on a compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces in the early 1970s. In 1977, he gave an ergodic theory reformulation, and subsequently proof, of Szemerédi's theorem. The Furstenberg boundary and Furstenberg compactification of a locally symmetric space are named after him.
Hillel Furstenberg was born in Germany, in 1935, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the Yeshiva University he concluded his BA and MSc studies in 1955. He obtained his Ph. D. under Salomon Bochner at Princeton University in 1958. After several years at the University of Minnesota he became a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965.
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Horace Barker
Horace Albert "Nook" Barker (November 29, 1907 – December 24, 2000) was an American biochemist and microbiologist who studied the operation of biological and chemical processes in plants, humans and other animals, including using radioactive tracers to determine the role enzymes play in synthesizing sucrose. He was recognized with the National Medal of Science for his role in identifying an active form of Vitamin B12.
Barker was born on November 29, 1907 in Oakland, California. He moved with his family to Palo Alto, California when he was 11 years old. He spent a year in Germany following high school, learning the German language and absorbing its culture. He attended Stanford University, graduating in 1929 with a bachelor's degree in physical science and was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1933.
After graduating from Stanford, he performed a two-year postgraduate fellowship at the Hopkins Marine Station under the supervision of microbiologist C. B. van Niel, who fostered Barker's interest in botany and taught him techniques for isolating microorganisms. He then spent a year at the Delft Microbiology Laboratory in the Netherlands under Albert Kluyver.
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Hyman Bass
Hyman Bass (born October 5, 1932) is an American mathematician, known for work in algebra and in mathematics education. From 1959-1998 he was Professor in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University, where he is now professor emeritus. He is currently the Roger Lyndon Collegiate Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Michigan.
Born in Houston, Texas, he earned his B.A. in 1955 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of Chicago. His thesis, titled Global dimensions of rings, was written under the supervision of Irving Kaplansky.
He has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, IHES and ENS (Paris), Tata Institute (Bombay), University of Cambridge, UC Berkeley, University of Rome, IMPA (Rio), National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mittag-Leffler Institute (Stockholm), and the University of Utah. He was president of the American Mathematical Society.
Bass formerly chaired the Mathematical Sciences Education Board (1992–2000) at the National Academy of Sciences, and the Committee on Education of the American Mathematical Society. He was the President of ICMI from 1999 to 2006. Since 1996 he has been collaborating with Deborah Ball and her research group at the University of Michigan on the mathematical knowledge and resources entailed in the teaching of mathematics at the elementary level. He has worked to build bridges between diverse professional communities and stakeholders involved in mathematics education.
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Iacopo Barsotti
Iacopo Barsotti, or Jacopo Barsotti, (Torino, 28 April 1921 – Padova, 27 October 1987) was an Italian mathematician who introduced Barsotti–Tate groups.
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Irvin Cohen
Irvin Sol Cohen (1917 – February 14, 1955) was an American mathematician at M.I.T. who worked on local rings. He was a student of Oscar Zariski at Johns Hopkins University.
In 1946 he proved the unmixedness theorem for power series rings, as a result of which Cohen–Macaulay ring are named after him and F. S. Macaulay.
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Isadore Singer
Isadore Manuel Singer (born April 24, 1924) is an Institute Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is noted for his work with Michael Atiyah proving the Atiyah–Singer index theorem in 1962, which paved the way for new interactions between pure mathematics and theoretical physics.
He was born in Detroit, Michigan, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1944. After obtaining his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948 and 1950 respectively, he taught at UCLA and MIT, where he has spent the majority of his career.
He was chair of the Committee of Science & Public Policy of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a member of the White House Science Council (1982-88), and on the Governing Board of the United States National Research Council (1995-99). Singer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the awards he has received are the Bôcher Memorial Prize (1969) and the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2000), both from the American Mathematical Society, the Eugene Wigner Medal (1988), the National Medal of Science (1983), the Abel Prize (2004, shared with Michael Atiyah), and the James Rhyne Killian Faculty Achievement Award from MIT (2005). He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
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Israel Gelfand
Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, also written Israïl Moyseyovich Gel'fand, or Izrail M. Gelfand (Yiddish: ישראל געלפֿאַנד, Russian: Изра́иль Моисе́евич Ге́льфанд; 2 September [O.S. 20 August] 1913—5 October 2009) was a Soviet mathematician who made major contributions to many branches of mathematics, including group theory, representation theory and functional analysis. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Order of Lenin and the Wolf Prize, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a lifelong academic, serving decades as a professor at Moscow State University and, after immigrating to the United States shortly before his 76th birthday, at the Busch Campus of New Jersey's Rutgers University.
He is known for having educated and inspired generations of students through his legendary seminar at Moscow State University. His legacy continues in the mathematicians who were his students, such as Endre Szemerédi, Alexandre Kirillov, Joseph Bernstein as well as his own son, Sergei Gelfand.
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Jack Steinberger
Jack Steinberger (born May 25, 1921) is a German-American physicist currently residing near Geneva, Switzerland. He co-discovered the muon neutrino, along with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for which they were given the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Steinberger was born in the city of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, Germany, in 1921. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany, with its open anti-Semitism, prompted his parents to send him out of the country.
Steinberger emigrated to the United States at the age of 13, making the trans-Atlantic trip with his brother Herbert. Barnett Farroll cared for him as a foster child, the connection was made by Jewish charities in the United States. During this period, Steinberger attended New Trier Township High School, in Winnetka, Illinois.
Steinberger studied chemical engineering at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) but left after his scholarship ended to help supplement his family's income. He obtained a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, in 1942. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Signal Corps at MIT. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he returned to graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1946, where he studied under Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi. His Ph.D. thesis concerned the energy spectrum of electrons emitted in muon decay; his results showed that this was a three-body decay, and implied the participation of two neutral particle in the decay (later identified as the electron (ν
e) and muon (ν
μ) neutrinos) rather than one.
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Jacob Bjerknes
Jacob Aall Bonnevie Bjerknes[needs IPA][pronunciation?] (November 2, 1897 – July 7, 1975) was a Norwegian-American meteorologist.
Jacob Aall Bonnevie Bjerknes was born in Stockholm, Sweden. His father was the Norwegian meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes, one of the pioneers of modern weather forecasting. His paternal grandfather was noted Norwegian mathematician and physicist, Carl Anton Bjerknes. His maternal grandfather was Norwegian politician, Jacob Aall Bonnevie after whom he was named.
Bjerknes was part of a group of meteorologists led by his father, Vilhelm Bjerknes, at the University of Leipzig. Together they developed the model that explains the generation, intensification and ultimate decay (the life cycle) of mid-latitude cyclones, introducing the idea of fronts, that is, sharply defined boundaries between air masses. This concept is known as the Norwegian cyclone model.
Bjerknes returned to Norway in where in 1917, his father founded the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen in Bergen. They organized an analysis and forecasting branch which would evolve into a weather bureau by 1919. The scientific team at Bergen also included the Swedish meteorologists Carl-Gustaf Rossby and Tor Bergeron. As pointed out in a key paper by Jacob Bjerknes and Halvor Solberg (1895-1974) in 1922, the dynamics of the polar front, integrated with the cyclone model, provided the major mechanism for north-south heat transport in the atmosphere. For this and other research, Jacob Bjerknes was awarded the Ph.D. from the University of Oslo in 1924.
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Jacques Tits
Jacques Tits (French pronunciation: [tits]; born 12 August 1930 in Uccle) is a Belgian and French mathematician who works on group theory and geometry and who introduced Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, and the Tits group.
Tits was born in Uccle to Léon Tits, a professor, and Lousia André. Jacques attended the Athénée of Uccle and the Free University of Brussels. His thesis advisor was Paul Libois, and Tits graduated with his doctorate in 1950 with the dissertation Généralisation des groupes projectifs basés sur la notion de transitivité. His academic career includes professorships at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) (1962-1964), the University of Bonn (1964-1974) and the Collège de France in Paris, until becoming emeritus in 2000. He changed his citizenship to French in 1974 in order to teach at the Collège de France, which at that point required French citizenship. Because Belgium does not allow dual nationalities, he renounced his Belgian citizenship. He has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since then.
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James Cronin
James Watson Cronin (born September 29, 1931) is an American nuclear physicist.
Cronin was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Cronin and co-researcher Val Logsdon Fitch were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of kaons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the interactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.
Cronin received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1976 for major experimental contributions to particle physics including fundamental work on weak interactions culminating in the discovery of asymmetry under time reversal. In 1999, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Cronin is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and a spokesperson emeritus for the Auger project. Cronin is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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James Glimm
James Gilbert Glimm (born 24 March 1934) is an American mathematical physicist, and Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
James Glimm was born in Peoria, Illinois, USA on 24 March 1934.
He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1959; his advisor was Richard V. Kadison.. Glimm had significant stints at New York University, and at Rockefeller University, before arriving at Stony Brook University in 1989.
He has been noted for contributions to C*-algebras, quantum field theory, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, scientific computing, the modeling of petroleum reservoirs. Together with Arthur Jaffe, he has founded a subject called constructive quantum field theory.
James Glimm was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984. He won the National Medal of Science in 2002. Starting January 1, 2007, he is serving a 2-year term as President of the American Mathematical Society.
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Janet Rowley
Janet Davison Rowley (born April 5, 1925) is an American human geneticist and the first scientist to identify a chromosomal translocation as the cause of leukemia and other cancers.
Janet Davison was born in New York City in 1925, the only child of Hurford and Ethel Ballantyne Davison. Her father held a master of business administration degree from Harvard Business School, and her mother a master's degree in education from Columbia University. Her parents were educators at the college and high school levels, respectively, and her mother later gave up teaching to become a school librarian.
Davison attended the academically challenging junior high school in New Jersey and became especially interested in science. In 1940, aged 15, she was granted a scholarship to study in an advanced placement program at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she finished high school and the first two years of college, followed by completion of her degree at the University of Chicago, where she earned a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1944, a bachelor of science degree in 1946, and doctor of medicine degree in 1948, aged 23. She married Donald Adams Rowley, also a physician, the day after graduating from medical school. Rowley balanced family life with her career by working part-time as she raised four sons. She began full-time research when the youngest was 12 years old.
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Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Originally trained in physiology, Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, and he is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Bessarabian Jewish family. His father Louis K. Diamond was a physician and his mother Flora Kaplan a teacher, musician, and linguist. He attended the Roxbury Latin School and earned an A.B. from Harvard College in 1958 and a Ph.D. in physiology and membrane biophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1961.
After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties, he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands. Then in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999 and an honorary doctorate by Westfield State University in 2009.
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Jay Laurence Lush
Jay Laurence Lush ((1896-01-03)January 3, 1896, Shambaugh, Iowa - May 22, 1982(1982-05-22)) was a pioneering animal geneticist who made important contributions to livestock breeding. He is sometimes known as the father of modern scientific animal breeding. Lush received National Medal of Science in 1968 and the Wolf Prize in 1979.
Lush was introduced to mathematics and genetics during his B.Sc. studies of animal husbandry at the Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University [KSU]). He completed his M.Sc. in 1918 at KSU, and his Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1922).
Lush advocated breeding not based on subjective appearance of the animal, but on quantitative statistics and genetic information. Lush authored a classic book 'Animal Breeding Plans' in 1937 which greatly influenced animal breeding around the world.
From 1930 to 1966, Lush was the Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor in Agriculture at Iowa State University. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1967.
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Jean Leray
Jean Leray (7 November 1906 – 10 November 1998) was a French mathematician, who worked on both partial differential equations and algebraic topology.
He was born in Chantenay-sur-Loire (today part of Nantes). He studied at École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1929. He received his Ph.D. in 1933. Leray wrote an important paper that founded the study of weak solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations. Together with Juliusz Schauder, he discovered a topological invariant, now called the Leray–Schauder degree, which they applied to prove the existence of solutions for partial differential equations lacking uniqueness.
From 1938 to 1939 he was professor at the University of Nancy. He did not join the Bourbaki group, although he was close with its founders.
His main work in topology was carried out while he was in a prisoner of war camp in Edelbach, Austria from 1940 to 1945. He concealed his expertise on differential equations, fearing that its connections with applied mathematics could lead him to be asked to do war work.
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Jerzy Neyman
Jerzy Neyman FRS (April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981), born Jerzy Spława-Neyman, was a Polish American mathematician and statistician who spent most of his professional career at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was born into a Polish catholic family in Bendery, Bessarabia in Imperial Russia, the fourth of four children of Czesław Spława-Neyman and Kazimiera Lutosławska. His family was Roman Catholic and Neyman served as an altar boy during his early childhood. Later, Neyman would become an agnostic. Neyman's family descended from a long line of Polish nobles and military heroes. He graduated from the Kamianets-Podilskyi gubernial gymnasium for boys in 1909 under the name Yuri Cheslavovich Neyman. He began studies at Kharkov University in 1912, where he was taught by Russian probabilist Sergei Natanovich Bernstein. After he read 'Lessons on the integration and the research of the primitive functions' by Henri Lebesgue, he was fascinated with measure and integration.
In 1921 he returned to Poland in a program of repatriation of POWs after the Polish-Soviet War. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree at University of Warsaw in 1924 for a dissertation titled "On the Applications of the Theory of Probability to Agricultural Experiments". He was examined by Wacław Sierpiński and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, among others. He spent a couple of years in London and Paris on a fellowship to study statistics with Karl Pearson and Émile Borel. After his return to Poland he established the Biometric Laboratory at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw.
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Jesse Beams
Jesse Wakefield Beams (December 25, 1898 in Belle Plaine, Kansas; died July 23, 1977) was an American physicist at the University of Virginia.
Beams completed his undergraduate B.A. in physics at Fairmount College in 1921 and his master's degree the next year at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Virginia, where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1925. He spent the next three years in a physics fellowship at Yale University, where he performed research on the photoelectric effect with Ernest Lawrence. Beams was appointed a professor of physics at the University of Virginia in 1929. During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project, where his ultracentrifuge was used to demonstrate the separation of the uranium isotope U-235 from other isotopes. Officials in charge of the atomic bomb project concluded, however, that Beams's centrifuges were not as likely as other methods to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb in the time available, and the centrifuge program was abandoned. After World War II, centrifuge separation of uranium isotopes was perfected by German scientists and engineers working in the Soviet Union. In 1953 Beams was appointed the Francis H. Smith Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia. Beams was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1967 for his work on the ultracentrifuge. He retired from the University in 1969.
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JoAnne Stubbe
JoAnne Stubbe is an American chemist. She is currently the Novartis Professor of Chemistry & Biology at th Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stubbe received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. She received Ph. D. degree in Organic Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation she became a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Stubbe moved to Williams College in 1972 as an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department. In 1977 she became an assistant professor in the Pharmacology Department at Yale University. In 1980 she moved to the University of Wisconsin, serving as assistant professor in the Biochemistry Department.
In 1987 Stubbe became a professor in the MIT Chemistry Department.
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John Bardeen
John Bardeen FRS (May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers to missiles. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity, which won him his second Nobel, are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
In 1990, John Bardeen appeared on LIFE Magazine's list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."
John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin on May 23, 1908. He was the second son of Dr. Charles Russell Bardeen and Althea Harmer Bardeen. He was one of five children. His father, Charles Bardeen, was Professor of Anatomy and the first Dean of the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Althea Bardeen, before marrying, had taught at the Dewey Laboratory School and run an interior decorating business; after marriage she was an active figure in the art world.
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John Cocke
John Cocke (May 30, 1925 – July 16, 2002) was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."
He attended Duke University, where he received his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1946 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1953. Cocke spent his entire career as an industrial researcher for IBM, from 1956 to 1992.
Perhaps the project where his innovations were most noted was in the IBM 801 minicomputer, where his realization that matching the design of the architecture's instruction set to the relatively simple instructions actually emitted by compilers could allow high performance at a low cost.
He is one of the inventors of CYK algorithm (C for Cocke).
Cocke won the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1985, ACM Turing Award in 1987, the National Medal of Technology in 1991 and the National Medal of Science in 1994,The Franklin Institute's Certificate of Merit in 1996, the Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award in 1999, and the The Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2000.
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John Milnor
John Willard Milnor (born February 20, 1931) is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, K-theory and dynamical systems. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University.
Milnor was born in Orange, New Jersey. As an undergraduate at Princeton University he was named a Putnam Fellow in 1949 and 1950 and also proved the Fary–Milnor theorem. He continued on to graduate school at Princeton and wrote his thesis, entitled "Isotopy of Links", which concerned link groups (a generalization of the classical knot group) and their associated link structure. His advisor was Ralph Fox. Upon completing his doctorate he went on to work at Princeton.
His students have included Tadatoshi Akiba, Jon Folkman, John Mather, Laurent C. Siebenmann, and Michael Spivak. His wife, Dusa McDuff, is a professor of mathematics at Barnard College.
His most celebrated single result is his proof in 1956 of the existence of 7-dimensional spheres with nonstandard differential structure. Later with Michel Kervaire, he showed that the 7-sphere has 15 differentiable structures (28 if one considers orientation). An n-sphere with nonstandard differential structure is called an exotic sphere, a term coined by Milnor. Egbert Brieskorn found simple algebraic equations for 28 complex hypersurfaces in complex 5-space such that their intersection with a small sphere of dimension 9 around a singular point is diffeomorphic to these exotic spheres. Subsequently Milnor worked on the topology of isolated singular points of complex hypersurfaces in general, developing the theory of the Milnor fibration whose fibre has the homotopy type of a bouquet of μ spheres where μ is known as the Milnor number. Milnor's 1968 book on his theory inspired the growth of a huge and rich research area which continues to develop to this day.
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John Roy Whinnery
John Roy Whinnery (July 26, 1916 – February 1, 2009) was an American electrical engineer and educator who worked in the fields of microwave theory and laser experimentation.
Whinnery received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1937, and the Ph.D. from the same institution in 1948. Throughout World War II, he was active in war training classes, held a part-time lectureship at Union College(1945–46), and earned his doctoral degree while working 6 days a week in microwaves at General Electric, Schenectady, New York, working on problems in waveguide discontinuities, microwave tubes, and applications to radar. He continued his career working on He-Ne laser modulation, the transmission of laser light for optical communication and photo thermal effects. His research evolved to include quantum electronics and opto-electronics as well.
Whinnery was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 1946, holding appointment as Lecturer, Associate Professor, and Professor. From 1952 to 1956, he directed the Electronics Research Laboratory; from 1956 to 1959, he was Chairman of the Electric Engineering Department; from 1959 to 1963, he was Dean of the College of Engineering at Berkeley. During Whinnery's terms, many of the most successful young faculty were hired to the College of Engineering, Berkeley, specifically in Electrical Engineering, contributing significantly to Berkeley's reputation as one of the premier colleges of engineering in the world today.
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John Tate
John Torrence Tate Jr. (born March 13, 1925) is an American mathematician, distinguished for many fundamental contributions in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry and related areas in algebraic geometry.
Tate was born in Minneapolis. His father, John Tate Sr., was a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, and a longtime editor of Physical Review. His mother, Lois Beatrice Fossler, was a high school English teacher. Tate Jr. received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University, and entered the doctoral program in physics at Princeton University. He later transferred to the mathematics department and received his PhD in 1950 as a student of Emil Artin. Tate taught at Harvard for 36 years before joining the University of Texas in 1990. He retired from the Texas mathematics department in 2009, and currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife Carol. He has three daughters with his first wife Karin Tate.
Tate's thesis (1950) on Fourier analysis in number fields has become one of the ingredients for the modern theory of automorphic forms and their L-functions, notably by its use of the adele ring, its self-duality and harmonic analysis on it; independently and a little earlier, Kenkichi Iwasawa obtained a similar theory. Together with his teacher Emil Artin, Tate gave a cohomological treatment of global class field theory, using techniques of group cohomology applied to the idele class group and Galois cohomology. This treatment made more transparent some of algebraic structures in the previous approaches to class field theory which used central division algebras to compute the Brauer group of a global field.
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John Tukey
John Wilder Tukey ForMemRS (June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American statistician best known for development of the FFT algorithm and box plot.
Tukey was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1915, and obtained a B.A. in 1936 and M.Sc. in 1937, in chemistry, from Brown University, before moving to Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics.
During World War II, Tukey worked at the Fire Control Research Office and collaborated with Samuel Wilks and William Cochran. After the war, he returned to Princeton, dividing his time between the university and AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Among many contributions to civil society, Tukey served on a committee of the American Statistical Association that produced a report challenging the conclusions of the Kinsey Report, Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1982 "For his contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm."
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Joseph Keller
Joseph B. Keller (born July 31, 1923, Paterson, New Jersey) is an American mathematician who specializes in applied mathematics. He is best known for his work on the "Geometrical Theory of Diffraction" (GTD).
He obtained his PhD in 1948 from New York University under the supervision of Richard Courant. He was a Professor of Mathematics in the Courant Institute at New York University until 1979. Then he was Professor of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University until 1993, when he became Professor Emeritus.
He has a brother who was also a mathematician, Herbert B. Keller, who has studied numerical analysis, scientific computing, bifurcation theory, path following and homotopy methods, and computational fluid dynamics. Herbert Keller was a professor at Caltech. Both brothers have contributed to the fields of electromagnetics and fluid dynamics.
He worked on the application of mathematics to problems in science and engineering, such as wave propagation. He contributed to the Einstein-Brillouin-Keller method for computing eigenvalues in quantum mechanical systems.
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Joseph Leo Doob
Joseph Leo Doob (February 27, 1910–June 7, 2004) was an American mathematician, specializing in analysis and probability theory.
The theory of martingales was developed by Doob.
Doob was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, February 27, 1910, the son of Leo Doob and Mollie Doerfler Doob. The family moved to New York City before he was three years old. The parents felt that he was underachieving in grade school and placed him in the Ethical Culture School, from which he graduated in 1926. He then went on to Harvard where he received a BA in 1930, an MA in 1931, and a PhD in 1932. After postdoctoral research at Columbia and Princeton, he joined the Department of Mathematics of the University of Illinois in 1935 and served until his retirement in 1978. He was a member of the Urbana campus's Center for Advanced Study from its beginning in 1959. During the Second World War, he worked in Washington, D. C. and Guam as a civilian consultant to the Navy.
Doob's thesis was on boundary values of analytic functions. He published two papers based on this thesis, which appeared in 1932 and 1933 in the Transactions of the AMS. Doob returned to this subject many years later when he proved a probabilistic version of Fatou's boundary limit theorem for harmonic functions.
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Joshua Lederberg
Joshua Lederberg ForMemRS (May 23, 1925 – February 2, 2008) was an American molecular biologist known for his work in microbial genetics, artificial intelligence, and the United States space program. He was just 33 years old when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and exchange genes. He shared the prize with Edward L. Tatum and George Beadle who won for their work with genetics.
In addition to his contributions to biology, Lederberg did extensive research in artificial intelligence. This included work in the NASA experimental programs seeking life on Mars and the chemistry expert system Dendral.
Lederberg was born in Montclair, New Jersey, to a Jewish family, son of Esther Goldenbaum Schulman Lederberg and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Lederberg, in 1925, and moved to Washington Heights, Manhattan as an infant. He had two younger brothers. Lederberg graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City at the age of 15 in 1941. After graduation, he was allowed lab space as part of the American Institute Science Laboratory, a forerunner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He enrolled in Columbia University in 1941, majoring in zoology. Under the mentorship of Francis J. Ryan, he conducted biochemical and genetic studies on the bread mold Neurospora crassa. Intending to receive his MD and fulfill his military service obligations, Lederberg worked as a hospital corpsman during 1943 in the clinical pathology laboratory at St. Albans Naval Hospital, where he examined sailors' blood and stool samples for malaria. He went on to receive his undergraduate degree in 1944.
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Julian Schwinger
Julian Seymour Schwinger (February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.
Schwinger is recognized as one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, responsible for much of modern quantum field theory, including a variational approach, and the equations of motion for quantum fields. He developed the first electroweak model, and the first example of confinement in 1+1 dimensions. He is responsible for the theory of multiple neutrinos, Schwinger terms, and the theory of the spin 3/2 field.
Julian Seymour Schwinger was born in New York City, to a Polish Jewish family, who had immigrated to America. Both his father and his mother's parents were prosperous clothing manufacturers, although the family business declined after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The family followed the Orthodox Jewish tradition. He attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York as an undergraduate before transferring to Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D. (overseen by I.I. Rabi) in 1939 at the age of 21. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley (under J. Robert Oppenheimer), and was later appointed to a position at Purdue University.
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Jürgen Moser
Jürgen Kurt Moser or Juergen Kurt Moser (July 4, 1928, Königsberg, East Prussia – December 17, 1999, Schwerzenbach, Kanton Zürich, Switzerland) was a German-American mathematician.
He completed his undergraduate education at and received his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1952, studying under Franz Rellich. After his thesis, he came under the influence of Carl Ludwig Siegel, with whom he coauthored the second and considerably expanded English language edition of a monography on celestial mechanics. Having spent the year 1953 at the Courant Institute of New York University as a Fulbright scholar, he emigrated to the United States in 1955 becoming a citizen in 1959. He became a professor at MIT and later at New York University. He served as director of the Courant Institute of New York University in the period of 1967–1970. In 1970 he declined the offer of a chair at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After 1980 he was at ETH Zürich, becoming professor emeritus in 1995. He was director of the Forschungsinstitut für Mathematik at ETH Zürich in 1984 - 1995, where he succeeded Beno Eckmann and lead a rebuilding of the ETH Zürich mathematics faculty. Moser was president of the International Mathematical Union in 1983 - 1986.
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Katherine Esau
Katherine Esau (3 April 1898 – 4 June 1997) was a German-American botanist.
She was born in Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) to a family of Mennonites of German descent. After the Revolution her family moved to Germany, and then to California, where she achieved her doctorate in 1931. She moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1963, and worked there until 1992. She was the sixth woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1957, and in 1989, President George Bush awarded Dr. Esau the National Medal of Science.
Esau was a pioneering plant anatomist--perhaps the greatest plant anatomist of the 20th century. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants have been key plant structural biology texts for four decades.
Dr. Esau was a gifted lecturer and author as well as a brilliant scientist. A kind and modest person, she never married and led a life full of scientific achievements, which inspires female scientists all over the world. The Katherine Esau Award is awarded to the graduate student who presents the best paper in structural and developmental biology at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America.
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Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Joseph Arrow (born August 23, 1921) is an American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to have received this award, at 51.
In economics, he is considered an important figure in post-World War II neo-classical economic theory. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves. Arrow's impact on the economics profession has been tremendous. For more than fifty years he has been one of the most influential of all practising economists.
His most significant works are his contributions to social choice theory, notably "Arrow's impossibility theorem", and his work on general equilibrium analysis. He has also provided foundational work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information.
Arrow was born on August 23, 1921, in New York City to parents of Romanian Jewish origins. His family was very supportive of his education.
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Kenneth Stewart Cole
Kenneth Stewart Cole (July 10, 1900 – April 18, 1984) was an American biophysicist described by his peers as "a pioneer in the application of physical science to biology". Cole was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1967.
Kenneth Cole was known to his wife as Ken but to all his friends as Kacy. His father, Charles Nelson Cole, was an instructor in Latin at Cornell University, and two years later the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, when his father took a post at Oberlin College. His father would later become the Dean. Kenneth's mother was Mabel Stewart, and he had a younger brother, Robert, with whom he remained very close throughout his life despite a large difference in age; they were joint authors of four papers published between 1936 and 1942.
Cole graduated from Oberlin College in 1922 and received a Ph.D. in physics with Floyd K. Richtmyer from Cornell University in 1926. He spent summers working at the General Electric Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.
In 1932, Cole married Elizabeth Evans Roberts, an attorney. Later, her work was mostly concerned with civil rights and in 1956 she joined the staff of the new Civil Rights Commission
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Kiyoshi Itō
Kiyoshi Itō (伊藤 清, Itō Kiyoshi?, September 7, 1915 – 10 November 2008) was a Japanese mathematician. His major contribution to mathematics is now called Itō calculus. Its basic concept is the Itō integral, and among the most important results is Itō's lemma. The Itō calculus facilitates mathematical understanding of random events. His theory is widely applied in various fields, and is perhaps best known for its use in financial mathematics.
Although the standard Hepburn romanization of his name is Itō, the spellings Itô (as in Kunrei-shiki romanization), Itoh, or Ito are often seen in the West as well.
Itō was born in Hokusei (Inabe) in Mie Prefecture on the main island of Honshū. After high school he studied mathematics at the Imperial University Tokyo, from which he graduated at the age of 23. After that he started to work for the national statistical office, where he published two of his seminal works on probability and stochastic processes.
In 1945, he was awarded a Ph.D. for his work. Seven years later he became a professor at the University of Kyoto, where he remained until his retirement in 1979. In addition, he held professorships at University of Aarhus from 1966 to 1969, and Cornell University from 1969 to 1975. Itō was awarded the inaugural Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize in 2006 for his lifetime achievements. As he was unable to travel to Madrid, his youngest daughter, Junko Itō (a professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in phonology), received the Gauss Prize from the King of Spain on his behalf.
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Kunihiko Kodaira
Kunihiko Kodaira (小平 邦彦, Kodaira Kunihiko?, 16 March 1915 – 26 July 1997) was a Japanese mathematician known for distinguished work in algebraic geometry and the theory of complex manifolds, and as the founder of the Japanese school of algebraic geometers. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1954, being the first Japanese national to receive this honour.
He was born in Tokyo. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1938 with a degree in mathematics and also graduated from the physics department at the University of Tokyo in 1941. During the war years he worked in isolation, but was able to master Hodge theory as it then stood. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Tokyo in 1949, with a thesis entitled Harmonic fields in Riemannian manifolds. He was involved in cryptographic work from about 1944, at a time of great personal difficulty[clarification needed], while holding an academic post in Tokyo.
In 1949 he travelled to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey at the invitation of Hermann Weyl. At this time the foundations of Hodge theory were being brought in line with contemporary technique in operator theory. Kodaira rapidly became involved in exploiting the tools it opened up in algebraic geometry, adding sheaf theory as it became available. This work was particularly influential, for example on Hirzebruch.
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Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel (/ˈkɜrt ɡɜrdəl/; German pronunciation: [ˈkʊʁt ˈɡøːdəl] ( listen); April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was an Austrian/American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when many, such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead and David Hilbert, were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.
Gödel is best known for his two incompleteness theorems, published in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The more famous incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.
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Lars Ahlfors
Lars Valerian Ahlfors (18 April 1907 – 11 October 1996) was a Finnish mathematician, remembered for his work in the field of Riemann surfaces and his text on complex analysis.
Ahlfors was born in Helsinki, Finland. His mother, Sievä Helander, died at his birth. His father, Axel Ahlfors, was a Professor of Engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology. The Ahlfors family was Swedish-speaking, so he first attended a private school where all classes were taught in Swedish. Ahlfors studied at University of Helsinki from 1924, graduating in 1928 having studied under Ernst Lindelöf and Rolf Nevanlinna. He assisted Nevanlinna in 1929 with his work on Denjoy's conjecture on the number of asymptotic values of an entire function. He completed his doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 1930.
Ahlfors worked as an associate professor at the University of Helsinki from 1933 to 1936. In 1936 he was one of the first two people to be awarded the Fields Medal. In 1935 Ahlfors visited Harvard University. He returned to Finland in 1938 to take up a professorship at the University of Helsinki. The outbreak of war led to problems although Ahlfors was unfit for military service. He was offered a post at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich in 1944 and finally managed to travel there in March 1945. He did not enjoy his time in Switzerland, so in 1946 he jumped at a chance to leave, returning to work at Harvard where he remained until he retired in 1977; he was William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics from 1964. He was awarded the Wihuri Prize in 1968 and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1981.
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Lars Hörmander
Lars Valter Hörmander (born 24 January 1931) is a Swedish mathematician who has been called "the foremost contributor to the modern theory of linear partial differential equations". He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1962, the Wolf Prize in 1988, and the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 2006. His Analysis of Linear Partial Differential Operators I–IV is considered a standard work on the subject of linear partial differential operators.
Hörmander completed his Ph.D. in 1955 at Lund University. Hörmander then worked at Stockholm University, at Stanford University, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He returned to Lund University as professor from 1968 until 1996, when he retired with the title of professor emeritus.
Hörmander was born in Mjällby, a village in Blekinge in southern Sweden where his father was a teacher. Like his older brothers and sisters before him, he attended the realskola (elementary school), in a nearby town to which he commuted by train, and the gymnasium (high school) in Lund from which he graduated in 1948.
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Lars Onsager
Lars Onsager (November 27, 1903 – October 5, 1976) was a Norwegian-born American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University.
Lars Onsager was born in Kristiania (today's Oslo), Norway. His father was a lawyer. After completing secondary school in Oslo, he attended the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim, graduating as a chemical engineer in 1925.
In 1925 he arrived at a correction to the Debye-Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions, to specify Brownian movement of ions in solution, and during 1926 published it. He traveled to Zürich, where Peter Debye was teaching, and confronted Debye, telling him his theory was wrong. He impressed Debye so much that he was invited to become Debye's assistant at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where he remained until 1928.
Eventually in 1928 he went to the United States of America to take a faculty position at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. At JHU he had to teach freshman classes in chemistry, and it quickly became apparent that, while he was a genius at developing theories in physical chemistry, he had little talent for teaching. He was dismissed by JHU after one semester.
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Lennart Carleson
Lennart Axel Edvard Carleson (born 18 March 1928) is a Swedish mathematician, known as a leader in the field of harmonic analysis.
He was a student of Arne Beurling and received his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in 1950. He is a professor emeritus at Uppsala University, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and has served as director of the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Djursholm outside Stockholm 1968–1984. Between 1978 and 1982 he served as president of the International Mathematical Union.
Carleson married Butte Jonsson in 1953, and they had two children: Caspar (born 1955) and Beatrice (born 1958).
His work has included the solution of some outstanding problems, using techniques from combinatorics and probability theory (especially stopping times). In the theory of Hardy spaces, Carleson's contributions include the corona theorem (1962) and establishing the almost everywhere convergence of Fourier series for square-integrable functions (now known as Carleson's theorem). He is also known for the theory of Carleson measures.
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Leo Beranek
Leo Leroy Beranek (born September 15, 1914) is an American acoustics expert, former MIT professor and a founder and former president of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies).
A student of piano at an early age, Beranek, growing up in Mount Vernon, Iowa, went on to study at Cornell College while working as a radio and small appliance repairman. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and went on to study at Harvard University, where he received a doctorate in 1940. During World War II, he managed Harvard's electro-acoustics laboratory, which designed communications and noise reduction systems for World War II aircraft, while at the same time developing other military technologies. During this time, he built the first anechoic chamber, an extremely quiet room for studying noise effects which later would inspire John Cage's philosophy of silence. Beranek remained on staff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of communications engineering from 1947 to 1958. In 1948, he helped found Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), serving as the company's president from 1952 to 1971.
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Leo Kadanoff
Leo Philip Kadanoff (born January 14, 1937) is an American physicist. He is a professor of physics (emeritus as of 2004) at the University of Chicago and a former President of the American Physical Society (APS). He has contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.
Kadanoff was raised in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree and doctorate in physics from Harvard University. After a post-doctorate at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, he joined the physics faculty at the University of Illinois in 1965.
Kadanoff's early research focused upon superconductivity. In the late 1960s, he studied the organization of matter in phase transitions. Kadanoff demonstrated that sudden changes in material properties (such as the magnetization of a magnet or the boiling of a fluid) could be understood in terms of scaling and universality. With his collaborators, he showed how all the experimental data then available for the changes, called second-order phase transitions, could be understood in terms of these two ideas. These same ideas have now been extended to apply to a broad range of scientific and engineering problems, and have found numerous and important applications in urban planning, computer science, hydrodynamics, biology, applied mathematics and geophysics. In recognition of these achievements, he won the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1977), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1980), the 1989 Boltzmann Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and the 2006 Lorentz Medal.
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Leonard Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock (born June 13, 1934) is an American engineer and computer scientist. A computer science professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, he made several important contributions to the field of computer networking, in particular to the theoretical side of computer networking. He also played an important role in the development of the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, at UCLA.
His most well-known and significant work is his early work on queueing theory, which has applications in many fields, among them as a key mathematical background to packet switching, the basic technology behind the Internet. His initial contribution to this field was his doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, published in book form in 1964; he later published several of the standard works on the subject. He described this work as:
"Basically, what I did for my PhD research in 1961–1962 was to establish a mathematical theory of packet networks..."
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Leonid Hurwicz
Leonid "Leo" Hurwicz (Russian: Леони́д Гу́рвич; August 21, 1917 – June 24, 2008) was a Russian-born American economist. His nationality of origin was Polish. He was Jewish. He originated incentive compatibility and mechanism design, which show how desired outcomes are achieved in economics, social science and political science. Interactions of individuals and institutions, markets and trade are analyzed and understood today using the models Hurwicz developed. To date, Leonid Hurwicz is the oldest Nobel Laureate, having received the prize at the age of 90.
Hurwicz was Regents' Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Minnesota. He was among the first economists to recognize the value of game theory and was a pioneer in its application. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for their work on mechanism design.
Hurwicz was born in Moscow, Russia, to a Jewish family a few months before the October Revolution. The family had originated in Poland and had lived in Congress Poland (the part of Poland then within the Russian Empire) but had been displaced by World War I. Soon after Leonid's birth, the family returned to Warsaw, Poland. Hurwicz and his family experienced persecution by both the Bolsheviks and Nazis, as he again became a refugee when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. His parents and brother fled Warsaw, only to be arrested and sent to Soviet labor camps. Hurwicz, who had graduated from Warsaw University in 1938, at the time of Nazi invasion on Poland was in London, moved to Switzerland then to Portugal and finally in 1940 he emigrated to the United States. His family eventually joined him there.
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Lonnie Thompson
Lonnie Thompson (born July 1, 1948), is an American paleoclimatologist and Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University. He has achieved global recognition for his drilling and analysis of ice cores from mountain glaciers and ice caps in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. He and his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, run the ice core paleoclimatology research group at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
Lonnie Thompson was born July 1, 1948 in Gassaway, West Virginia. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Marshall University, where he majored in geology. He subsequently attended The Ohio State University where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in geology. In the 1970s, he was the first scientist "to retrieve ice samples from a remote tropical ice cap and analyze them for ancient climate signals." He created the ice core research program at Ohio State while still a graduate student there. In regards to the dedication required to attain this ice, one author writes:
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Louis Nirenberg
Louis Nirenberg (born 28 February 1925) is a Canadian-born American mathematician, and one of the outstanding analysts of the twentieth century. He has made fundamental contributions to linear and nonlinear partial differential equations and their application to complex analysis and geometry.
He was born in Hamilton, Ontario and attended Baron Byng High School. He studied as an undergraduate at McGill University, and obtained his doctorate from New York University in 1949 under the direction of James Stoker. He became a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He was also conferred the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, at the University of British Columbia in 2010.
He has received many honours and awards, including the Crafoord Prize, the Bôcher Memorial Prize, the Jeffery-Williams Prize, the Steele Prize, the National Medal of Science, and the Chern Medal.
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Lubert Stryer
Lubert Stryer (born March 2, 1938, in Tianjin, China) is the Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, Emeritus, at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007, he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density micro-arrays for genetic analysis, and authoring a biochemistry textbook .
Stryer received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago in 1957 and his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at Harvard and then at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, before joining the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford in 1963. In 1969, he moved to Yale to become Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and in 1976, he returned to Stanford to head a new Department of Structural Biology.
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Luis Caffarelli
Luis A. Caffarelli (born December 8, 1948) is an Argentinian mathematician and leader in the field of partial differential equations and their applications.
Caffarelli obtained his Masters of Science (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) at the University of Buenos Aires. He currently holds the Sid Richardson Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He also has been a professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. From 1986 to 1996 he was a permanent member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1991 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris; Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Universidad de La Plata, Argentina. He received the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1984.
Caffarelli received great recognition with his breakthrough paper "The regularity of free boundaries in higher dimensions" published in 1977 in Acta Mathematica. Since then, he has been considered one of the world's leading experts in free boundary problems and nonlinear partial differential equations. He developed several regularity results for fully nonlinear elliptic equations including the Monge-Ampere equation. He is also famous for his contributions to homogenization. Recently, he has taken an interest in Integro-differential equations. One of his most cited and celebrated results regards the Partial regularity of suitable weak solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations, obtained in 1982 in collaboration with Louis Nirenberg and Robert V. Kohn.
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Luis Walter Alvarez
Luis W. Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez (1911–1988) was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968, and took out over 40 patents, some of which led to commercial products.
Alvarez was of Spanish descent from his paternal grandfather. Alvarez was the son of Walter C. Alvarez, a doctor who for a time was a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, and of Harriet Smythe, and a grandson of Luis F. Alvarez, a doctor living in Hawaii who found a better method for diagnosing macular leprosy. His aunt, Mabel Alvarez, was a California artist specializing in oil painting. Alvarez married Geraldine Smithwick in 1936 and had two children, Walter and Jean. In 1958, he married Janet L. Landis and had two more children, Donald and Helen.
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Lyman Spitzer
Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr. (June 26, 1914 – March 31, 1997) was an American theoretical physicist and astronomer best known for his research in star formation, plasma physics, and in 1946, for conceiving the idea of telescopes operating in outer space. Spitzer invented the stellarator plasma device and is the namesake of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Spitzer was born in Toledo, Ohio, the son of Blanche Carey (née Brumback) and Lyman Strong Spitzer. Through his paternal grandmother, he was related to inventor Eli Whitney. Spitzer graduated from Scott High School. He then attended Phillips Academy in 1929 and went on to Yale College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1935 and was a member of Skull and Bones. During a year of study at Cambridge University, he was influenced by Arthur Eddington and the young Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Returning to the U.S., Spitzer earned his MA from Princeton University in 1937 and his PhD in 1939, under the direction of Henry Norris Russell.
Spitzer's brief time as a faculty member at Yale was interrupted by his wartime work on the development of sonar. In 1947, at the age of 33, he succeeded Russell as director of Princeton University Observatory, an institution that, virtually jointly with his contemporary Martin Schwarzschild, he continued to head until 1979.
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Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Alexander) (March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was an American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory, which is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed. She is also associated with the Gaia hypothesis, based on an idea developed by the English environmental scientist James Lovelock.
Lynn Margulis attended the University of Chicago, earned a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1960, and received her Ph.D. in 1963 from UC Berkeley. In 1966, as a young faculty member at Boston University, she wrote a theoretical paper entitled The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells. The paper however was "rejected by about fifteen scientific journals," Margulis recalled. It was finally accepted by The Journal of Theoretical Biology and is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. Although it draws heavily on symbiosis ideas first put forward by mid-19th century scientists and by Merezhkovsky (1905) and Ivan Wallin (1920) in the early-20th century, Margulis's endosymbiotic theory formulation is the first to rely on direct microbiological observations (as opposed to paleontological or zoological observations which were previously the norm for new works in evolutionary biology). Weathering constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis is famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time.
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László Lovász
László Lovász (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈlaːsloː ˈlovaːs], born March 9, 1948) is a Hungarian–American mathematician, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the Wolf Prize and the Knuth Prize in 1999, and the Kyoto Prize in 2010.
In high school, Lovász won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (in years 1964, 1965, 1966 with two special prizes) and so did his son in 2008.
Lovász received his Candidate of Sciences degree in 1970 at Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His advisor was Tibor Gallai.
Until 1975, Lovász worked at the Eötvös University, between 1975–1982, he led the Department of Geometry at the University of Szeged. In 1982, he returned to the Eötvös University, where he created the Department of Computer Science. The former and current scientists of the department include György Elekes, András Frank, József Beck, Éva Tardos, András Hajnal, Lajos Pósa, Miklós Simonovits, Tamás Szőnyi.
Lovász was a professor at Yale University during the 1990s and was a collaborative member of the Microsoft Research Center until 2006. He returned to Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he was the director of the Mathematical Institute (2006–2011).
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Manson Benedict
Manson Benedict (October 9, 1907 – September 18, 2006) was an American nuclear engineer and a professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1958 to 1968, he was the chairman of the advisory committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Born in Lake Linden, Michigan, Benedict received a B.S. from Cornell University in chemistry, and a Ph.D. from MIT in physical chemistry. It was at MIT where he met his wife Marjorie, who also received a Ph.D. in chemistry.
Benedict was well known for his pioneering role in nuclear Engineering. He developed the gaseous diffusion method for separating the isotopes of uranium and supervised the engineering and process development of the K-25 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where fissionable material for the atomic bomb was produced. He received many awards for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later career as a scientist, educator, and public servant, which focused on nuclear power and other peaceful uses of atomic energy. Among his awards were: the William H. Walker award in 1947, the Perkin Medal in 1966, the Robert E. Wilson Award in 1968, the Enrico Fermi Award in 1972, and the National Medal of Science from President Gerald Ford in 1975. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1952.
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Mark Krein
Mark Grigorievich Krein (Russian: Марк Григо́рьевич Крейн; 3 April 1907 – 17 October 1989) was a Soviet Jewish mathematician, one of the major figures of the Soviet school of functional analysis. He is known for works in operator theory (in close connection with concrete problems coming from mathematical physics), the problem of moments, classical analysis and representation theory.
He was born in Kiev, leaving home at age 17 to go to Odessa. He had a difficult academic career, not completing his first degree and constantly being troubled by anti-Semitic discrimination. His supervisor was Nikolai Chebotaryov.
He was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1982 (jointly with Hassler Whitney), but was not allowed to attend the ceremony.
David Milman, Mark Naimark, Izrail Glazman, Moshe Livshits and other known mathematicians were his students.
He died in Odessa.
14 January 2008, the memorial plaque of Mark Krein was unveiled on the main administration building of I.I. Mechnikov Odessa National University
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Marshall Rosenbluth
Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth (5 February 1927 – 28 September 2003) was an American plasma physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1997 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for discoveries in controlled thermonuclear fusion, contributions to plasma physics and work in computational statistical mechanics. He was also a recipient of the E.O. Lawrence Prize (1964), the Albert Einstein Award (1967), the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics (1976), and the Enrico Fermi Award (1985).
During his first post-doctoral position at Stanford University (1949–1950), he derived the Rosenbluth formula, which was the basis of the analysis used by Robert Hofstadter in his Nobel prize-winning experimental investigation of electron scattering. Hofstadter refers to this in his 1961 Nobel Lecture: "This behavior can be understood in terms of the theoretical scattering law developed by M. Rosenbluth in 1950". In 1953, Rosenbluth derived the Metropolis algorithm; cited in Computing in Science and Engineering (Jan. 2000) as being among the top 10 algorithms having the "greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century." However, by the late 1950s, Rosenbluth turned his attention to the burgeoning discipline of plasma physics and quickly laid the foundation for many avenues of research in the field, particularly the theory of plasma instabilities. Although he continued to work on plasma physics for the remainder of his career, he often made forays into other fields. For example, around 1980, he and coworkers produced a detailed analysis of the free electron laser, indicating how its spectral intensity can be optimized. He maintained a high productivity rate throughout his entire career. Indeed, only a few years before his death, Rosenbluth discovered the existence of residual flows (so-called Rosenbluth-Hinton flows), a key result for understanding turbulence in tokamaks.
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Marston Morse
Harold Calvin Marston Morse (24 March 1892 – 22 June 1977) was an American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large, a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory. In 1933 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis.
He was born in Waterville, Maine to Ella Phoebe Marston and Howard Calvin Morse in 1892. He received his bachelor's degree from Colby College (also in Waterville) in 1914. At Harvard University, he received both his master's degree in 1915 and his Ph.D. in 1917.
He taught at Harvard, Brown, and Cornell Universities before accepting a position in 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained until his retirement in 1962.
He spent most of his career on a single subject, eponymously titled Morse Theory, a branch of differential topology. Morse Theory is a very important subject in modern mathematical physics, such as string theory.
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Martin David Kruskal
Martin David Kruskal (September 28, 1925 – December 26, 2006) was an American mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions in many areas of mathematics and science, ranging from plasma physics to general relativity and from nonlinear analysis to asymptotic analysis. His single most celebrated contribution was the discovery and theory of solitons.
He was a student at the University of Chicago and at New York University, where he completed his Ph.D. under Richard Courant in 1952. He spent much of his career at Princeton University, as a research scientist at the Plasma Physics Laboratory starting in 1951, and then as a professor of astronomy (1961), founder and chair of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (1968), and professor of mathematics (1979). He retired from Princeton University in 1989 and joined the mathematics department of Rutgers University, holding the David Hilbert Chair of Mathematics.
Apart from his research, Kruskal was known as a mentor of younger scientists. He worked tirelessly and always aimed not just to prove a result but to understand it thoroughly. And he was notable for his playfulness. He invented the Kruskal Count, a magical effect that has been known to perplex professional magicians because – as he liked to say – it was based not on sleight of hand but on a mathematical phenomenon.
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Martin Schwarzschild
Martin Schwarzschild (May 31, 1912 – April 10, 1997) was a German-born American astronomer. He was the son of famed astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild and the nephew of the Swiss astrophysicist Robert Emden.
Schwarzschild was born in Potsdam into a distinguished German Jewish academic family. In line with a request in his father's will, his family moved to Göttingen in 1916. Schwarzschild studied at the University of Göttingen and took his doctoral examination in December 1936. He left Germany in 1936 for Norway and then the United States. Schwarzschild served in the US army intelligence. He was awarded the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star for his wartime service. After returning to the US, he married fellow astronomer Barbara Cherry. In 1947, Martin Schwarzschild joined his life-long friend, Lyman Spitzer at Princeton University. Spitzer died 10 days before Schwarzschild.
Schwarzschild's work in the fields of stellar structure and stellar evolution led to improved understanding of pulsating stars, differential solar rotation, post-main sequence evolutionary tracks on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (including how stars become red giants), hydrogen shell sources, the helium flash, and the ages of star clusters. Much of this was done with R. Härm. Schwarzschild’s 1958 book Structure and Evolution of the Stars taught a generation of astrophysicists how to apply electronic computers to the computation of stellar models.
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Mary Ellen Avery
Mary Ellen Avery (May 6, 1927 – December 4, 2011) was an American pediatrician. In the 1950s, Dr. Avery's pioneering research efforts helped lead to the discovery of the main cause of respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) in premature babies: her identification of surfactant led to the development of replacement therapy for premature infants and has been credited with saving over 830,000 lives. In 1991 President George Bush conferred the National Medal of Science on Dr. Avery for her work on RDS.
Mary Ellen Avery was born May 6, 1927, in Camden, New Jersey. Her father owned a manufacturing company in Philadelphia and her mother was vice-principal of a high school. An early inspiration was pediatrician Emily Bacon, who lived in Avery's neighborhood. She greatly admired Dr. Bacon, who took Avery to see her first premature baby. "She kindly reached out to me in many ways, and I saw her life as more exciting and meaningful than most of the women I knew," Avery has recalled.
Graduating summa cum laude from Wheaton College in 1948 with a degree in chemistry, Mary Ellen Avery went on to earn a medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she was one of four women in a class of ninety, in 1952. Soon after graduating, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and it was during her recuperation that she became fascinated with how the lungs work. Rest and medication would cure her, but she went about the regime her own way. Once she realized she was exhibiting no symptoms, she decided to go to Europe with a friend. "I packed one suitcase of medication and another suitcase of clothes, and spent three months in Europe on a regime that I programmed for myself," Avery said. "It consisted of 12 hours in bed every night, and in the daytime mostly walking around and looking at exhibits and enjoying myself, but not anything strenuous."
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Marye Anne Fox
Marye Anne Payne Fox (born 9 December 1947) is a physical organic chemist and university administrator. She was the first female chief executive of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In April 2004, Fox was named Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego.
Fox was born in Canton, Ohio and received her B.S. from Notre Dame College and her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College, both in chemistry. She held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Maryland from 1974 to 1976. In the later year, she joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1994 she became vice president of research there.
Fox is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has served as president of the scientific research society Sigma Xi. Fox earned a B.S. in chemistry from Notre Dame College in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Dartmouth College in 1974. In 1976 she joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where she rose to direct the Center for Fast Kinetics Research and, in 1994, was appointed the university's Vice President for Research. Even as a university administrator, she maintained an active research program in the fields of organic photochemistry and electrochemistry.
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Maurice Ewing
William Maurice "Doc" Ewing (May 12, 1906 – May 4, 1974) was an American geophysicist and oceanographer.
Ewing has been described as a pioneering geophysicist who worked on the research of seismic reflection and refraction in ocean basins, ocean bottom photography, submarine sound transmission (including the SOFAR channel), deep sea coring of the ocean bottom, theory and observation of earthquake surface waves, fluidity of the Earth's core, generation and propagation of microseisms, submarine explosion seismology, marine gravity surveys, bathymetry and sedimentation, natural radioactivity of ocean waters and sediments, study of abyssal plains and submarine canyons.
He was born in Lockney, Texas, where he was the eldest child of a large farm family. He won a scholarship to attend Rice University, earning a B.A. with honors in 1926. He completing his graduate studies at the same institution, earning an M.A. in 1927 and being awarded his Ph.D. in 1931. In 1928 he was married to Avarilla Hildenbrand, and the couple had a son.
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Maurice Goldhaber
Maurice Goldhaber (April 18, 1911 – May 11, 2011) was an Austrian-born American physicist, who in 1957 (with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar) established that neutrinos have negative helicity.
He was born on April 18, 1911 in Lemberg, Austria now called Lviv, Ukraine.
After beginning his physics studies at the University of Berlin, he earned his doctorate at Cambridge University in 1936.
In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England he and James Chadwick, through what they called the nuclear photo-electric effect, established that the neutron has a great enough mass over the proton to decay.
He moved to the University of Illinois in 1938. In the 1940s with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber he established that beta particles are identical to electrons.
He joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1950. With Edward Teller he proposed that the so-called "giant-dipole nuclear resonance" was due to the neutrons in a nucleus vibrating as a group against the protons as a group (Goldhaber-Teller model).
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Maurice Hilleman
Maurice Ralph Hilleman (August 30, 1919 – April 11, 2005) was an American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over three dozen vaccines, more than any other scientist. Of the fourteen vaccines routinely recommended in current vaccine schedules, he developed eight: those for measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria. He also played a role in the discovery of the cold-producing adenoviruses, the hepatitis viruses, and the cancer-causing virus SV40.
He is credited with saving more lives than any other scientist of the 20th century.Robert Gallo described him as "the most successful vaccinologist in history".
Hilleman was born on a farm near the high plains town of Miles City, Montana. His parents were Anna and Gustav Hillemann, and he was their eighth child. His twin sister died when he was born, and his mother died two days later. He was raised in the nearby house hold of his uncle, Robert Hilleman, and worked in his youth on the family farm. He credits much of his success to his work with chickens as a boy. Chicken eggs are used to develop vaccines based on weakened viruses.
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Max Tishler
Max Tishler (October 30, 1906 – March 18, 1989) was president of Merck Sharp and Dohme Research Laboratories where he led the research teams that synthesized ascorbic acid, riboflavin, cortisone, miamin, pyridoxine, pantothenic acid, nicotinamide, methionine, threonine, and tryptophan. He also developed the fermentation processes for actinomycin, vitamin B12, streptomycin, and penicillin. Tishler invented sulfaquinoxaline for the treatment for coccidiosis.
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 30, 1906. His father repaired shoes and he abandoned the family in 1911. Max worked in a pharmacy during the flu pandemic of 1918. He studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Tufts College, where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.
In 1934 he earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard University. He married Elizabeth M. Verveer in 1934. He taught at Harvard from 1934 to 1937. His son, Peter Verveer Tishler, was born on July 18, 1937. In 1937, he took a position at Merck. His first project at Merck was to produce riboflavin. In the 1940s he developed a process for the synthesis of cortisone.
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Maxine Singer
Maxine Frank Singer (born February 15, 1931) is an American molecular biologist and science administrator. She is known for her contributions to solving the genetic code, her role in the ethical and regulatory debates on recombinant DNA techniques (including the organization of the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA), and her leadership of Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Singer was born in New York City. After attending public high school in Brooklyn, she majored in chemistry (and minored in biology) at Swarthmore College. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1957 at Yale University, researching protein chemistry under Joseph Fruton. Fruton encouraged her to specialize in nucleic acids, and in 1956 she joined the Laboratory of Biochemistry of Leon Heppel at the National Institutes of Health. Through her work there on RNA synthesis, Singer produced synthetic nucleotides that were used in Marshall Nirenberg's experiments establishing the triplet nature of the genetic code.
In the wake of the 1973 report of the first use of recombinant DNA techniques to introduce genes from one species into another, Singer was among the first to call attention to the possible risks of genetic engineering. She was a chairperson of the 1973 Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids, where the possible public health risks of the technique were discussed, and she helped to organize the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA that resulted in guidelines for dealing with the largely unknown risks of the technique.
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Maxwell Rosenlicht
Maxwell Alexander Rosenlicht (April 15, 1924 – January 22, 1999) was an American mathematician known for works in algebraic geometry, algebraic groups and differential algebra.
Rosenlicht went to school in Brooklyn (Erasmus High School) and studied at Columbia University (B.A. 1947) and at Harvard University, where he studied under Zariski and was awarded in 1950 his doctorate (on an Algebraic Curve Equivalence Concepts). In 1952 he went to Northwestern University. Until his retirement in 1991 he was a professor at Berkeley. He was also a visiting professor in Mexico City, IHES, Rome, Leiden and Harvard.
In 1960 he shared the Cole Prize in algebra with Serge Lang for his work on generalized Jacobian varieties. He also studied the algorithmic algebraic theory of integration.
Rosenlicht was a Fulbright Fellow and 1954 Guggenheim Fellow.
He died of neurological disease on a trip to Hawaii. Rosenlicht married in 1954 and had four children.
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Melvin Calvin
Melvin Ellis Calvin (April 8, 1911 – January 8, 1997) was an American chemist most famed for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
Calvin was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was born in Tsarist Lithuania and his mother in Tsarist Georgia. As a small child, Calvin's family moved to Detroit; he graduated from Central High School in 1928. Melvin Calvin earned his Bachelor of Science from the Michigan College of Mining and Technology (now known as Michigan Technological University) in 1931 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1935. He then spent the next four years doing postdoctoral work at the University of Manchester. He married Genevieve Jemtegaard in 1942, and they had three children, two daughters and a son.
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Michael Artin
Michael Artin (born 1934) is an American mathematician and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematics department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry and also generally recognized as one of the outstanding professors in his field.
Artin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana.[citation needed] His father was Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20-th century.[citation needed] He did his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, receiving an A.B. in 1955; he then moved to Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of Oscar Zariski.
In the early 1960s Artin spent time at the IHÉS in France, contributing to the SGA4 volumes of the Séminaire de géométrie algébrique, on topos theory and étale cohomology. His work on the problem of characterising the representable functors in the category of schemes has led to the Artin approximation theorem, in local algebra. This work also gave rise to the ideas of an algebraic space and algebraic stack, and has proved very influential in moduli theory. Additionally, he has made contributions to the deformation theory of algebraic varieties. He is currently[update] working on noncommutative rings, especially geometric aspects.[citation needed]
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Michael Aschbacher
Michael George Aschbacher (born April 8, 1944) is an American mathematician best known for his work on finite groups. He was a leading figure in the completion of the classification of finite simple groups in the 1970s and 1980s. It later turned out that the classification was incomplete, because the case of quasithin groups had not been finished. This gap was fixed by Aschbacher and Stephen D. Smith in 2004, in a pair of books comprising about 1300 pages. Aschbacher is currently the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.
Aschbacher received his B.S. at the California Institute of Technology in 1966 and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969. He joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 1970 and became a full professor in 1976. He was awarded the Cole Prize in 1980, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1990. In 1992, Aschbacher was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize for Mathematics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2011. In 2012 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
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Michael Freedman
Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is a mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R4 manifold exists.
Freedman was born in Los Angeles. His father, Benedict Freedman, was an aeronautical engineer, musician, writer, and mathematician. His mother, Nancy Mars Freedman, performed as an actress and also trained as an artist. His parents cowrote a series of novels together. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, and continued his studies at Princeton University where he received Ph.D. degree in 1973 for his doctoral dissertation titled Codimension-Two Surgery, written under the supervision of William Browder. After graduating, Freedman was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He held this post from 1973 until 1975, when he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. In 1976 he was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He spent the year 1980/81 at IAS, returning to UCSD, where in 1982 he was promoted to professor. He was appointed the Charles Lee Powell chair of mathematics at UCSD in 1985.
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Michael Heidelberger
Michael Heidelberger FRS (April 29, 1888 – June 25, 1991) was an American immunologist who is regarded as the father of modern immunology. He and Oswald Avery showed that the polysaccharides of pneumococcus are antigens, enabling him to show that antibodies are proteins. He spent almost his entire career at Columbia University, though in his later years he was also on the faculty of New York University. In 1934 and 1936 he received the Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967 he received the National Medal of Science, and then he earned the Lasker Award for basic medical research in 1953 and again in 1978.
Heidelberger was born in 1888 in New York City to David and Fannie Campe Heidelberger, a traveling salesman and a homemaker respectively. An older brother had died shortly after birth; a younger brother, David, was born 21 months after Michael. His paternal grandfather, also named Michael, was a German Jew who had emigrated to the United States in the wake of the German Revolution of 1848.
Heidelberger's father had only an elementary school education, and was on the road for six months out of the year selling window curtains. It fell to Heidelberger's mother to take charge of the household and of Michael's education. She had attended a private girl's school in Norfolk, Virginia, and after graduation had stayed with relatives in Germany for a year. Until Michael was twelve, she taught him and his younger brother at home. They attended classical concerts, had to speak German at the table, and were taught French by a nanny during outings to nearby Central Park. Later in life he came to appreciate his early training in languages that were central to scientific discourse during the first half of the twentieth century.
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Mikio Sato
Mikio Sato (佐藤 幹夫, Satō Mikio?, born April 18, 1928) is a Japanese mathematician, who started the field of algebraic analysis. He studied at the University of Tokyo, and then did graduate study in physics as a student of Shin'ichiro Tomonaga. From 1970 Sato has been professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, of Kyoto University.
He is known for his innovative work in a number of fields, such as prehomogeneous vector spaces and Bernstein–Sato polynomials; and particularly for his hyperfunction theory. This initially appeared as an extension of the ideas of distribution theory; it was soon connected to the local cohomology theory of Grothendieck, for which it was an independent origin, and to expression in terms of sheaf theory. It led further to the theory of microfunctions, interest in microlocal aspects of linear partial differential equations and Fourier theory such as wave fronts, and ultimately to the current developments in D-module theory. Part of that is the modern theory of holonomic systems: PDEs over-determined to the point of having finite-dimensional spaces of solutions.
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Mildred Cohn
Mildred Cohn (July 12, 1913 – October 12, 2009) was an American biochemist. She graduated from high school at 14 and went on to receive her Bachelor's from Hunter College in 1931, her master's in 1932 from Columbia University, and her PhD in physical chemistry in 1938 from Columbia. Cohn joined the staff of the University of Pennsylvania in 1960.
Cohn wrote 160 papers, focusing on the topics of isotopes and ATP. She won the Garvan-Olin Medal the National Medal of Science in 1982. She was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1975.
During her career, Cohn achieved several gender firsts: She was the first woman to be appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the first woman to become president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the first female career investigator for the American Heart Association. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.
Outside science, Cohn was married to physicist Henry Primakoff from 1946 until his death in 1983.
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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and is known for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes, and The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."
Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as "monetarism". He theorized there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen
Nicolaas Bloembergen (born Dordrecht, March 11, 1920) is a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate.
He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Leiden in 1948; while pursuing his PhD at Harvard, Bloembergen also worked part-time as a graduate research assistant for Edward Mills Purcell at the MIT Radiation Laboratory [1]. He became a professor at Harvard University in Applied Physics.
Bloembergen enrolled in 1938 at the University of Utrecht to study physics. Bloembergen left the war ravaged Netherlands in 1945 to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University. Six weeks before his arrival, Harvard Professor Edward M. Purcell (along with his graduate students Torrey and Pound) discovered nuclear magnetic resonance. Bloembergen was hired to develop a first NMR machine. While at Harvard he enjoyed classes from J. Schwinger, J. H. van Vleck, and E. C. Kemble. His thesis Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation was submitted in Leiden, where he passed qualifying criteria. After a brief postdoctoral appointment with C. J. Gorter in the Netherlands, he joined Harvard where he was named a junior fellow of Society of Fellows in 1949 and Associate Professor in 1951.
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Nina Fedoroff
Nina Vsevolod Fedoroff (born 1942) is an American professor known for her research in life sciences and biotechnology, especially transposable elements or jumping genes and plant stress response. She is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), an Evan Pugh Professor of Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. She received from President George W. Bush in 2007 the National Medal of Science in the field of Biological Sciences, the highest award for lifetime achievement in scientific research in the United States. Professor Fedoroff was elected to be the the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a position she held from 2011 to 2012. She is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she graduated summa cum laude in 1966 from Syracuse University with a dual major in biology and chemistry. She received her PhD in molecular biology 1972 from The Rockefeller University. Fedoroff has been honored with the Howard Taylor Ricketts Award from University of Chicago in 1990 , and in 1992 she received the New York Academy of Sciences Outstanding Contemporary Women Scientist Award. In 1997 Fedoroff received the John P. McGovern Science and Society Medal from Sigma Xi. Fedoroff arrived at Penn State in 1995 as the Verne M. Willaman professor of Life Sciences and founded and directed the organization now known as the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. In 2002, she was appointed an Evan Pugh professor, the university's highest academic honor.
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Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894, Columbia, Missouri – March 18, 1964, Stockholm, Sweden) was an American mathematician. He was Professor of Mathematics at MIT.
A famous child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
Wiener is regarded as the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with many implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.
Wiener was the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn, Jews of Polish and German descent, respectively. Norbert Wiener became a famous child prodigy. Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics, and tutored his son in the subject until he left home.
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Norman Borlaug
Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist, humanitarian, and Nobel laureate who has been called "the father of the Green Revolution". Borlaug was one of six people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honor.
Borlaug received his Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.
During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.
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Norman Hackerman
Norman Hackerman (March 2, 1912 – June 16, 2007) was an American chemist, internationally known as an expert in metal corrosion, and a former president of both the University of Texas at Austin (1967–1970) and Rice University (1970–1985).
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he was the only son of Jacob Hackerman and Anna Raffel, immigrants from the Baltic regions of the Russian Empire that later became Estonia and Latvia, respectively.
Hackerman earned his bachelor's degree in 1932 and his doctor's degree in chemistry in 1935 from Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Johns Hopkins, Loyola College in Baltimore and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, before working on the Manhattan Project in World War II.
He joined the University of Texas in 1945 as an assistant professor of chemistry, became an associate professor in 1946, a full professor in 1950, a department chair in 1952, dean of research in 1960, vice president and provost in 1961, and vice chancellor for academic affairs for the University of Texas System in 1963. Hackerman left the University of Texas in 1970 for Rice, where he retired 15 years later. He was named professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Texas in 1985 and taught classes until the end of his life.[citation needed]
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Orville Vogel
Orville Vogel (1907–1991) was an American scientist and wheat breeder whose research made possible the "Green Revolution" in world food production.
Orville Alvin Vogel was born in Pilger, Stanton County, Nebraska, one of the four children of William and Emelia Vogel. He graduated from high school in 1925 and received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1929 and 1931, respectively. He married Bertha Berkman in 1931 and began his career as a wheat breeder at Washington State College (now University) in Pullman in 1931. Vogel worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture Research Service at Washington State University for his whole career, from 1931 to 1972.
Cecil Salmon, a biologist working in post-World War II Japan, collected 16 varieties of wheat, including one called “Norin 10”, which was very short, thus less likely to suffer wind damage. Salmon sent it to Orville Vogel in Washington in 1949. Vogel began crossing Norin 10 with other wheats to make new short-strawed varieties. Vogel led the team that developed Gaines, the first of several new varieties that produced 25 percent higher yields than the varieties they replaced. Vogel shared his germplasm with Norman Borlaug, who later received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the “green revolution.” Borlaug publicly acknowledged Vogel’s contributions to his research.
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Oscar Zariski
Oscar Zariski (born Oscher Zaritsky April 24, 1899, in Kobrin, Russian Empire (today Belarus), died July 4, 1986, Brookline, Massachusetts) was a Russian mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.
Zariski was born Oscher (also transliterated as Ascher or Osher) Zaritsky to a Jewish family (his parents were Bezalel Zaritsky and Hanna Tennenbaum) and in 1918 studied at the University of Kiev. He left Kiev in 1920 to study in Rome where he became a disciple of the Italian school of algebraic geometry, studying with Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi.
Zariski wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1924 on a topic in Galois theory. At the time of his dissertation publication, he changed his name for professional purposes to Oscar Zariski.
Zariski emigrated to the United States in 1927 supported by Solomon Lefschetz. He had a position at Johns Hopkins University where he became professor in 1937. During this period, he wrote Algebraic Surfaces as a summation of the work of the Italian school. The book was published in 1935 and reissued 36 years later, with detailed notes by Zariski's students that illustrated how the field of algebraic geometry had changed. It is still an important reference.
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Othmar Ammann
Othmar Hermann Ammann (March 26, 1879 – September 22, 1965) was a Swiss-American structural engineer whose designs include the George Washington Bridge, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and Bayonne Bridge.
Othmar Ammann was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1879. His father was a manufacturer and his mother was a hat maker. He received his engineering education at the Polytechnikum in Zürich, Switzerland. He studied with Swiss engineer Wilhelm Ritter. In 1904, he emigrated to the United States, spending his career working mostly in New York City. In 1905 he briefly returned to Switzerland to marry Lilly Selma Wehrli. Together they had 3 children- Werner, George, and Margaret- before she died in 1933. In 1924, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He then married Karly Vogt Noetzli in 1935 in California.
Ammann wrote two reports about bridge collapses, the collapse of the Quebec Bridge and the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie). It was the report that he wrote about the failure of the Quebec Bridge in 1907 that first earned him recognition in the field of bridge design engineering. Because of this report, he was able to obtain a position working for Gustav Lindenthal on the Hell Gate Bridge. By 1925, he had been appointed bridge engineer to the Port of New York Authority. His design for a bridge over the Hudson River was accepted over one developed by his mentor, Lindenthal. (Lindenthal's "North River Bridge" designs show an enormous, 16+ lane bridge that would have accommodated pedestrians, freight trains, rapid transit, and automobile traffic. The bridge, which would have entered Manhattan at 57th Street, was rejected in favor of Ammann's designs primarily due to cost reasons.)
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Patrick Suppes
Patrick Colonel Suppes (born March 17, 1922) is an American philosopher who has made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology, and educational technology. He is currently the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Stanford University School of Education.
Suppes was born on March 17, 1922, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He grew up as an only child, later with a half brother George who was born in 1943 after Patrick had entered the army. His grandfather, C.E. Suppes, had moved to Oklahoma from Ohio. Suppes' father and grandfather were independent oil men. His mother died when he was a young boy. He was raised by his stepmother, who married his father before he was six years old. His parents did not have much formal education.
Suppes began college at the University of Oklahoma in 1939, but transferred to the University of Chicago in his second year, citing boredom with intellectual life in Oklahoma as his primary motivation. In his third year, at the insistence of his family, Suppes attended the University of Tulsa, majoring in physics, before entering the Army Reserves in 1942. In 1943 he returned to the University of Chicago and graduated with a B.S. in meteorology, and was stationed shortly thereafter at the Solomon Islands to serve during World War II.
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Paul Alfred Weiss
Paul Alfred Weiss (March 21, 1898 – September 8, 1989) was an Austrian biologist who specialised in morphogenesis, development, differentiation and neurobiology. A teacher, experimenter and theorist, he made a lasting contribution to science in his lengthy career, throughout which he sought to encourage specialists in different fields to meet and share insights.
Paul Weiss was born in Vienna the son of Carl S. Weiss, a businessman, and Rosalie Kohn Weiss. His background favoured music, poetry, and philosophy – Weiss himself was a violinist – but an uncle encouraged an interest in science. Weiss received his baccalaureate in 1916.
After the end of the First World War, having served for three years as an officer in the artillery, he commenced studies in mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, (now Vienna University of Technology). He then shifted his focus to biology with a minor in physics. He absorbed the studies of Edmond B. Wilson, Edwin G. Concklin, and Theodor Bovari and completed his doctoral thesis in 1922 under Hans Prizbram, then director of the Biological Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, on the responses of butterflies to light and gravity.
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Paul Berg
Paul Berg (born June 30, 1926) is an American biochemist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, along with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger. The award recognized their contributions to basic research involving nucleic acids. Berg received his undergraduate education at Penn State University, where he majored in biochemistry. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1952. Berg worked as a professor at Washington University School of Medicine and Stanford University School of Medicine, in addition to serving as the director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Berg was presented with the National Medal of Science in 1983 and the National Library of Medicine Medal in 1986.
Berg graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1943, received his B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State University in 1948 and Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1952. He is a member of the Beta Sigma Rho fraternity (now Beta Sigma Beta).
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Paul Erdős
Paul Erdős (occasionally spelled Erdos or Erdös; Hungarian: Erdős Pál, pronounced [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. He is also known for his "legendarily eccentric" personality.
Paul Erdős was born in Budapest, Hungary on March 26, 1913. He was the only surviving child of Anna and Lajos Erdős (formerly Engländer); his siblings died before he was born, aged 3 and 5. His parents were both Jewish mathematicians from a vibrant intellectual community. His fascination with mathematics developed early—at the age of three, he could calculate how many seconds a person had lived.
Both of Erdős's parents were high school mathematics teachers, and Erdős received much of his early education from them. Erdős always remembered his parents with great affection. At 16, his father introduced him to two of his lifetime favorite subjects—infinite series and set theory. During high school, Erdős became an ardent solver of the problems proposed each month in KöMaL, the Mathematical and Physical Monthly for Secondary Schools. Erdős later published several articles in it about problems in elementary plane geometry.
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Paul Flory
Paul John Flory (June 19, 1910 – September 9, 1985) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate who was known for his prodigious volume of work in the field of polymers, or macromolecules. He was a leading pioneer in understanding the behavior of polymers in solution, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1974 "for his fundamental achievements, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules."
After graduating from Elgin High School in Elgin, Illinois in 1927, Flory received a bachelor's degree from Manchester College (Indiana) in 1931 and a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1934. His first position was at DuPont with Wallace Carothers.
Flory's earliest work in polymer science was in the area of polymerization kinetics at the DuPont Experimental station. In condensation polymerization, he challenged the assumption that the reactivity of the end group decreased as the macromolecule grew, and by arguing that the reactivity was independent of the size, he was able to derive the result that the number of chains present decreased with size exponentially. In addition polymerization, he introduced the important concept of chain transfer to improve the kinetic equations and remove difficulties in understanding the polymer size distribution.
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Paul Gyorgy
Dr. Paul Gyorgy (April 7, 1893- March 1, 1976) was a Hungarian-born American nutritionist and pediatrician, a recipient of the National Medal of Science, best known for his discovery of three vitamins: riboflavin, vitamin B6, and bitotin. The citation that President Gerald Ford citation gave Gyorgy with the National Medal of Science read: "For his discovery of three vitamins and related research that have greatly improved human nutrition". Gyorgy was Professor of Pediatrics, University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He was also Chief of Pediatrics at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and Chief of Pediatrics at Philadelphia General Hospital.
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Paul Samuelson
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist, and the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Swedish Royal Academies stated, when awarding the prize, that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory." Economic historian Randall E. Parker calls him the "Father of Modern Economics", and The New York Times considered him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century."
He was author of the largest-selling economics textbook of all time: Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948. It was the second American textbook to explain the principles of Keynesian economics and how to think about economics, and the first one to be successful, and is now in its 19th edition, having sold nearly 4 million copies in 40 languages. James Poterba, former head of MIT's Department of Economics, noted that by his book, Samuelson "leaves an immense legacy, as a researcher and a teacher, as one of the giants on whose shoulders every contemporary economist stands." In 1996, when he was awarded the National Medal of Science, considered America's top science honor, President Bill Clinton commended Samuelson for his "fundamental contributions to economic science" for over 60 years.
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Peter Debye
Peter Joseph William Debye FRS (March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye attended the Aachen University of Technology, Rhenish Prussia just 30 km away in 1901. He studied mathematics and classical physics, and, in 1905, received a degree in electrical engineering. In 1907, he published his first paper, a mathematically elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye.
In 1906, Sommerfeld received an appointment at Munich, Bavaria, and took Debye with him as his assistant. Debye got his Ph.D. with a dissertation on radiation pressure in 1908. In 1910, he derived the Planck radiation formula using a method which Max Planck agreed was simpler than his own.
In 1911, when Albert Einstein took an appointment as a professor at Prague, Bohemia, Debye took his old professorship at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. This was followed by moves to Utrecht in 1912, to Göttingen in 1913, to ETH Zurich in 1920, to Leipzig in 1927, and in 1934 to Berlin, where, succeeding Einstein, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (now named the Max-Planck-Institut) whose facilities were built only during Debye's era. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1935. From 1937 to 1939 he was the president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.
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Peter Dervan
Peter B. Dervan (born June 28, 1945) is the Bren Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. The primary focus of his research is the development and study of small organic molecules that can sequence-specifically recognize DNA, a field in which he is an internationally recognized authority. He is married to fellow Caltech chemist Jacqueline Barton.
Dervan received his B.S. from Boston College in 1967. He began graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin then moved on to complete his graduate studies at Yale University, in the laboratory of Jerome Berson. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1972, and performed post-doctoral research at Stanford through 1973, as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow.
From Stanford, Dervan became an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Caltech. He received tenure in 1979 and is currently the Bren Professor of Chemistry. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He served as Chair of Caltech's Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. He is a founding member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Gilead Sciences. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Beckman Coulter. He serves on the editorial advisory board for the journals Bioorganic Chemistry, Bioconjugate Chemistry, Tetrahedron, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, Current Opinion in Drug Discovery and Development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and ACS Chemical Biology. He was recently elected as an Alumni Fellow to the Yale Corporation, and was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science in 2006 for his "fundamental research contributions" in organic chemistry.
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Peter Goldreich
Peter Goldreich (born July 14, 1939) is an American astrophysicist whose research focuses on celestial mechanics, planetary rings, helioseismology and neutron stars. He is currently the Lee DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics at California Institute of Technology. Since 2005 he has also been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Asteroid 3805 Goldreich is named after him.
Goldreich received a bachelor of science in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1960, and obtained a Ph.D. from Cornell in 1963 under the supervision of Thomas Gold. In 1963 and 1964 Goldreich was a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University. From 1964 to 1966 he was an Assistant Professor of Astronomy & Geophysics at UCLA. Goldreich joined the faculty at Caltech in 1966 as an associate professor. He later became a full professor in 1969 while remaining at Caltech, and in 1981 he became the Lee A. DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics & Planetary Physics also at Caltech.
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Peter Lax
Peter David Lax (born 1 May 1926) is am American mathematician working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. He has made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves, solitonic physics, hyperbolic conservation laws, and mathematical and scientific computing, among other fields. Lax is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
Lax was born in Budapest, Hungary in Jewish family, and moved with his parents (Klara Kornfield and Henry Lax, both were medical doctors) to New York City in 1941, where he studied at Stuyvesant High School. In 1948 he married Anneli Cahn, who also was on her way to becoming a career mathematician.
He is an alumnus of New York University, where he received both his bachelor's degree in 1947 with Phi Beta Kappa honors and his PhD in 1949 with thesis advisor Kurt O. Friedrichs.
In a 1958 paper Lax stated a conjecture about matrix representations for third order hyperbolic polynomials which remained unproven for over four decades. Interest in the "Lax conjecture" grew as mathematicians working in several different areas recognized the importance of its implications in their field, until it was finally proven to be true in 2003.
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Philip Abelson
Philip Hauge Abelson (April 27, 1913 – August 1, 2004) was an American physicist, a scientific editor, and a science writer.
Abelson was born in 1913 in Tacoma, Washington. He attended Washington State University where he received degrees in chemistry and physics, and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he earned his PhD in nuclear physics. As a young physicist, he worked for Ernest Lawrence at the UC Berkeley. He was among the first American scientists to verify nuclear fission in an article submitted to the Physical Review in February 1939. In addition, he collaborated with the Nobel Prize laureate Luis Alvarez in early nuclear research, and was the co-discoverer of neptunium on 8 June 1940 with Edwin McMillan. McMillan was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery amongst other elements.
Abelson was a key contributor to the Manhattan Project during World War II. Although he was not formally associated with the atom bomb project, the liquid thermal diffusion isotope separation technique that he invented at the Philadelphia Navy Yard was used in the S-50 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and proved a critical step in creating the large amount of nuclear fuel required for building atomic bombs.
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Philip Handler
Philip Handler (August 13, 1917 – December 1981) was an American nutritionist, and biochemist. He was President of the United States National Academy of Sciences for two terms from 1969 to 1981. He was also a recipient of the National Medal of Science.
Handler grew up in a Jewish family in New York City. He received his B.S. degree from the City College of New York in 1936 and his Ph.D. from University of Illinois in 1939. He taught at Duke University where he was named the youngest chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at age 35. Handler remained at Duke until 1969 at which point he accepted the position of president of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a biochemist, he published more than 200 papers on nutrition and metabolic activity. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1964. He received the National Medal of Science in 1981 for, "his outstanding contribution to biochemical research, resulting in significant contributions to mankind, including research which led to a clearer understanding of pellagra" (Bioscience Article).
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Philip Leder
Philip Leder (b. November 19, 1934) is an American geneticist. He was born in Washington, D.C. and studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1956. In 1960, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his medical residency at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Leder is one of the most accomplished scientists of the modern molecular genetics era, having made seminal contributions in each decade from the 1960s through the 1990s. He is perhaps best known for his early work with Marshall Nirenberg in the elucidation of the genetic code and the Nirenberg and Leder experiment. Since that landmark experiment, he has made several groundbreaking contributions in the fields of molecular genetics, immunology and the genetic basis of cancer. His group was the first to define the base sequence of a complete mammalian gene (the gene for betaglobin) which enabled him to determine its organization in detail, including its associated control signals. His research into the structure of genes which carry the code for antibody molecules was of pioneering significance. The main focus of this inquiry was the question of how the enormous diversity of antibody molecules are formed by a limited number of encoded genes. Leder's work on antibody genes was later extended to research into Burkitt's lymphoma, a tumour of antibody-producing cells, which involves the oncogene c-myc. This was crucial in understanding the origin of this type of tumor. In 1988, Leder and Timothy Stewart were granted the first patent on a genetically engineered animal. This animal, a mouse which had genes injected into its embryo to increase susceptibility to cancer, became known as the "oncomouse" and has been used in the laboratory study of cancer therapy.
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Phillip Griffiths
Not to be confused with Phillip Griffith, another American mathematician also working in algebraic geometry.
Phillip Augustus Griffiths (born October 18, 1938, Raleigh, North Carolina) is an American mathematician, known for his work in the field of geometry, and in particular for the complex manifold approach to algebraic geometry. He was a major developer in particular of the theory of variation of Hodge structure in Hodge theory and moduli theory.
He received his B.S. from Wake Forest College in 1959 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1962 working under Donald Spencer. Since then, he has held positions at Berkeley (1962-1967), Princeton (1967-1972), Harvard University (1972-1983), Duke University (1983-1991), and the Institute for Advanced Study (1991 to the present), where he was Director until 2003. He has published on algebraic geometry, differential geometry, geometric function theory, and the geometry of partial differential equations.
In 2008 he was awarded the Wolf Prize (jointly with Deligne and Mumford). He is co-author, with Joe Harris, of Principles of Algebraic Geometry, a well-regarded textbook on complex algebraic geometry.
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Pierre Deligne
Pierre René, Viscount Deligne (born 3 October 1944) is a highly influential Belgian mathematician. He is known for work on the Weil conjectures, leading finally to a complete proof in 1973.
He was born in Etterbeek, attended school at Athénée Adolphe Max and studied at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
After completing a doctorate under the supervision of Alexander Grothendieck, he worked with him at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) near Paris, initially on the generalization within scheme theory of Zariski's main theorem. In 1968, he also worked with Jean-Pierre Serre; their work led to important results on the l-adic representations attached to modular forms, and the conjectural functional equations of L-functions. Deligne's also focused on topics in Hodge theory. He introduced weights and tested them on objects in complex geometry. He also collaborated with David Mumford on a new description of the moduli spaces for curves. Their work came be seen as an introduction to one form of the theory of algebraic stacks, and recently has been applied to questions arising from string theory. Perhaps Deligne's most famous contribution was his proof of the third and last of the Weil conjectures. This proof completed a programme initiated and largely developed by Alexander Grothendieck. As a corollary he proved the celebrated Ramanujan-Petersson conjecture for modular forms of weight greater than one; weight one was proved in his work with Serre. Deligne's paper (1974) contains the first proof of the Weil conjectures, Deligne's contribution being to supply the estimate of the eigenvalues of Frobenius, considered the geometric analogue of the Riemann Hypothesis.
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Pierre Samuel
Pierre Samuel (12 September 1921 – 23 August 2009) was a French mathematician, known for his work in commutative algebra and its applications to algebraic geometry. The two-volume work Commutative Algebra that he wrote with Oscar Zariski is a classic. Other books of his covered projective geometry and algebraic number theory. He ran a Paris seminar during the 1960s, and became Professeur émérite at the Université Paris-Sud (Orsay). His lectures on unique factorization domains published by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research played a significant role in computing the Picard group of a Zariski surface via the work of Jeffrey Lang and collaborators. The method was inspired by earlier work of Nathan Jacobson and Pierre Cartier another outstanding member of the Bourbaki group. Nicholas Katz related this to the concept of p-curvature of a connection introduced by Alexander Grothendieck.
He was a member of the Bourbaki group, and filmed some of their meetings. A French television documentary on Bourbaki broadcast some of this footage in 2000.
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Ralph Brazelton Peck
Dr. Ralph Brazelton Peck (June 23, 1912 – February 18, 2008) was an eminent civil engineer specializing in soil mechanics. He died on February 18, 2008 from congestive heart failure. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 "for his development of the science and art of subsurface engineering, combining the contributions of the sciences of geology and soil mechanics with the practical art of foundation design."
Peck was born in Winnipeg to O.K. and Ethel Peck, and moved to the United States at age six. In 1934 he received his Civil Engineer degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was given a three year fellowship for graduate work in structures. On June 14, 1937 he married Marjorie Truby and obtained a Doctor of Civil Engineering degree.
After receiving his degree, he worked briefly for the American Bridge Company, then on the Chicago Subway, but Peck spent the majority of his teaching career (32 years) at the University of Illinois, initially in structures but later focused on civil engineering under the influence of Karl Terzaghi, ultimately retiring in 1974. He continued to work until 2005 and was highly influential as a consulting engineer, with some 1,045 consulting projects in foundations, ore storage facilities, tunnel projects, dams, and dikes, including the Cannelton and Uniontown lock and dam construction failures on the Ohio River, the dams in the James Bay project, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, the Dead Sea dikes and the Rion-Antirion Bridge in Greece.
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Raoul Bott
Raoul Bott, FRS (September 24, 1923 – December 20, 2005) was a Hungarian mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem.
Bott was born in Budapest, Hungary, grew up in Slovakia and spent his working life in the United States. His family emigrated to Canada in 1938, and subsequently he served in the Canadian Army in Europe during World War II. He later went to college at McGill University in Montreal, where he studied electrical engineering. He then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1949. His thesis, titled Electrical Network Theory, was written under the direction of Richard Duffin. Afterward, he began teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1959 to 1999. He died 2005 in San Diego after a battle with cancer.
Initially he worked on the theory of electrical circuits (Bott-Duffin theorem from 1949), then switched to pure mathematics.
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Riccardo Giacconi
Riccardo Giacconi (born October 6, 1931) is an Italian-born, naturalized American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid the foundations of X-ray astronomy. He is currently a professor at the Johns Hopkins University.
Born in Genoa, Italy he received a degree from the University of Milan before moving to the US to pursue a career in astrophysics research. He became an American citizen.[not in citation given]
Cosmic X-ray radiation is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, and so space-based telescopes are needed for X-ray astronomy. Giacconi worked on the instrumentation for X-ray astronomy, from rocket-borne detectors in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through to Uhuru, the first orbiting X-ray astronomy satellite, the Einstein Observatory, the first fully imaging X-ray telescope put into space, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory which was launched in 1999 and is still in operation. Giacconi also transferred his expertise to other fields of astronomy, including being the first director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Richard Brauer
Richard Dagobert Brauer (February 10, 1901 – April 17, 1977) was a leading German and American mathematician. He worked mainly in abstract algebra, but made important contributions to number theory. He was the founder of modular representation theory.
Alfred Brauer was Richard’s brother and seven years older. Alfred and Richard were both interested in science and mathematics, but Alfred was injured in combat in World War I. As a boy, Richard dreamt of becoming an inventor, and in February 1919 enrolled in Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg. He soon transferred to University of Berlin. Except for the summer of 1920 when he studied at University of Freiburg, he studied in Berlin, being awarded his doctorate 16 March 1926. Issai Schur conducted a seminar and posed a problem in 1921 that Alfred and Richard worked on together, and published a result. The problem also was solved by Heinz Hopf at the same time. Richard wrote his thesis under Schur, providing an algebraic approach to irreducible, continuous, finite-dimensional representations of real orthogonal (rotation) groups.
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Richard Garwin
Richard Lawrence Garwin (born April 19, 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio), is an American physicist. He received his bachelor's degree from the Case Institute of Technology in 1947 and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1949, where he worked in the lab of Enrico Fermi.
Garwin is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. For many years he was an adjunct professor of physics at Columbia University and, from 1952, a scientist at the IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University, retiring from IBM in 1993. He has also been an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
Garwin received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for the fields of science and engineering, award year 2002.
Among other things, Garwin was the author of the actual design used in the first hydrogen bomb (code-named Mike) in 1952. He was assigned the job by Edward Teller, with the instructions that he was to make it as conservative a design as possible in order to prove the concept was feasible (as such, the Mike device was not intended to be a usable weapon design, with tons of cryogenic equipment required for its use).
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Roald Hoffmann
Roald Hoffmann (born July 18, 1937) is an American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.
Hoffmann was born in Zolochiv,(Ukraine) to a Jewish family and was named in honor of the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen. After Germany invaded Poland and occupied the town, his family was placed in a labor camp where his father, a civil engineer familiar with much of the local infrastructure, was a valued prisoner. As the situation grew more dangerous, with prisoners being transferred to liquidation camps, the family bribed guards to allow an escape and arranged with Ukrainian neighbors for Hoffman, his mother, two uncles and an aunt to hide in the attic and a storeroom of the local schoolhouse, where they remained for fifteen months, while Hoffman was aged 5 to 7.
His father remained at the labor camp, but was able to occasionally visit, until he was tortured and killed by the Germans for his involvement in a plot to arm the camp prisoners. When she received the news, his mother attempted to contain her sorrow by writing down her feelings in a notebook her husband had been using to take notes on a relativity textbook he had been reading. While in hiding his mother kept Hoffman entertained by teaching him to read and having him memorize geography from textbooks stored in the attic, then quizzing him on it. He referred to the experience as having been enveloped in a cocoon of love.
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Robert Byron Bird
Robert Byron Bird (born February 5, 1924, Bryan, Texas) is a Chemical Engineer and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is known for his research in Transport phenomena of Non-Newtonian fluids, including fluid dynamics of polymers, polymer kinetic theory, and rheology. He, along with Warren E. Stewart and Edwin N. Lightfoot, is an author of the classic textbook Transport Phenomena. Bird was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1987.
Bird received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1947 and Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1950. During 1950-1951, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Instituut voor Theoretische Fysica, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Bird is a recipient of the National Medal of Science; the Medal was awarded by President Ronald Reagan "for his profoundly influential books and research on kinetic theory, transport phenomena, the behavior of polymeric fluids, and foreign language study for engineers and scientists." He was awarded the Bingham Medal in 1974 for his outstanding contributions to the field of rheology.
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Robert Hofstadter
Robert Hofstadter (February 5, 1915 – November 17, 1990) was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rudolf Mössbauer) "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons."
Hofstadter was born in New York City on Feb. 5, 1915, to Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and the former Henrietta Koenigsberg. He attended elementary and high schools in New York City and entered City College of New York, graduating with a B.S. degree magna cum laude in 1935 at the age of 20, and was awarded the Kenyon Prize in Mathematics and Physics. He also received a Charles A. Coffin Foundation Fellowship from the General Electric Company, which enabled him to attend graduate school at Princeton University, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1938. He did his post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania before joining Stanford University. Hofstadter taught at Stanford University from 1950 to 1985.
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Robert Huebner
Robert Joseph Huebner (pronounced HYOOB-ner; February 23, 1914 – August 26, 1998), was an American physician and virologist whose research into viruses, their causes and treatment that led to his breakthrough insights into the connections between viruses and cancer, leading to new treatments, as well as his hypothesized oncogene, which was discovered to be a trigger for normal cells turning cancerous.
Huebner was born in Cheviot, Ohio, a western suburb of Cincinnati, on February 23, 1914. After attending a local parish elementary school, he attended Elder High School, graduating in 1932. He attended Xavier College (later Xavier University, where he majored in economics and English literature and took the prerequisites to attend law school. He decided he wanted to become a physician and did his premed undergraduate training at the University of Cincinnati. He attended the Saint Louis University School of Medicine starting in 1938. He was threatened with expulsion from the school after officials there discovered that he had taken outside work to pay for his education in violation of school policy — including a job as a bouncer at a brothel — but stayed in school and graduated in 1942. He graduated in June 1942, ranked in the top five of his class of 100.
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Robert Kates
Robert W. Kates (born January 31, 1929) is an American geographer and independent scholar in Trenton, Maine, and University Professor (Emeritus) at Brown University.
Kates was born in Brooklyn, New York. Unusual for an academic, he never completed an undergraduate degree. He studied Economics at New York University from 1946-8, but dropped out. He went to work in a steel mill in Indiana. He had a chance encounter with a naturalist in a state park in Indiana when on vacation with his family, and this meeting inspired him to become an elementary school teacher. To realise this career he signed up for night school at Indiana University, Gary in 1957, when aged 28. One of his classes to become a teacher was in geography. Having found his calling and his discipline, he sought study advice from Gilbert F. White at the University of Chicago. White gave him some key texts to read, Kates returned to discuss them, White recognized his abilities and steered him through an MA and eventually a PhD in Geography (1962). Kates taught at the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University from 1962 until 1987. At Clark he founded CENTED (the Centre for technology, environment, and development), now part of the Marsh Institute, where he remains a Distinguished Scientist. He worked in Africa with Clark colleagues, and also developed and directed a resource assessment centre at the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania (from 1967–68).
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Robert Langlands
Robert Phelan Langlands (born October 6, 1936) is a mathematician, best known as the founder of the Langlands program. He is an emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. His work in automorphic forms and representation theory has had a major effect on number theory.
Langlands received an undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia in 1957, and continued on there to receive an M. Sc. in 1958. He then went to Yale University where he received a Ph.D. in 1960. His academic positions since then include the years 1960-67 at Princeton University, ending up as Associate Professor, and the years 1967-72 at Yale University. He was appointed Hermann Weyl Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1972, becoming Professor Emeritus in January 2007.
His Ph.D. thesis was on the analytical theory of semi-groups, but he soon moved into representation theory, adapting the methods of Harish-Chandra to the theory of automorphic forms. His first accomplishment in this field was a formula for the dimension of certain spaces of automorphic forms, in which particular types of Harish-Chandra's discrete series appeared.
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Robert Lefkowitz
Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D. (born April 15, 1943) is an American physician-scientist best known for his work with G protein-coupled receptors.
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Robert Pound
Robert Vivian Pound (May 16, 1919 – April 12, 2010) was an Americanphysicist who helped discover nuclear magnetic resonance and who devised the famous Pound-Rebka experiment supporting general relativity .
Pound was born in Ridgeway, Ontario.
The discovery of NMR won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1952,[citation needed] though, due to the limitation on the number of recipients and the simultaneous discovery of NMR by Felix Bloch's group,[citation needed] Pound's advisor Ed Purcell received the award on behalf of his group at Harvard.[citation needed] Pound received the National Medal of Science in 1990 for his lifetime contributions to the field of physics.[citation needed] Pound was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the class of 1941 at the University at Buffalo.
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Robert Solow
Robert Merton Solow (born August 23, 1924) is an American economist particularly known for his work on the theory of economic growth that culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal (in 1961) and the 1987 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York in a Jewish family on August 23, 1924, the oldest of three children. He was well educated in the neighborhood public schools of New York City and excelled academically early in life. In September 1940, Solow went to Harvard College with a scholarship at the age of 16. At Harvard, his first studies were in sociology and anthropology as well as elementary economics.
By the end of 1942, Solow left the university and joined the U.S. Army. He served briefly in North Africa and Sicily, and later served in Italy during World War II until he was discharged in August 1945.
He returned to Harvard in 1945, and studied under Wassily Leontief. As his research assistant he produced the first set of capital-coefficients for the input-output model. Then he became interested in statistics and probability models. From 1949–50, he spent a fellowship year at Columbia University to study statistics more intensively. During that year he was also working on his Ph.D. thesis, an exploratory attempt to model changes in the size distribution of wage income using interacting Markov processes for employment-unemployment and wage rates.
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Robin Hartshorne
Robin Cope Hartshorne (born March 15, 1938) is an American mathematician. Hartshorne is an algebraic geometer who studied with Zariski, Mumford, J.-P. Serre and Grothendieck.
He was a Putnam Fellow in Fall, 1958. He received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1963 and then became a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, where he taught for several years. In the 1970s he was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently retired.
Hartshorne is the author of the popular text Algebraic Geometry. He plays the shakuhachi.
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Roger Adams
Roger Adams (January 2, 1889 – July 6, 1971) was an American organic chemist. He is best-known for the eponymous Adams' catalyst, and his work did much to determine the composition of naturally occurring substances such as complex vegetable oils and plant alkaloids. As the Department Head of Chemistry at the University of Illinois from 1926 -1954, he also greatly influenced graduate education in America, taught over 250 Ph.D. students and postgraduate students, and served the U.S. as a scientist at the highest levels during World War I and World War II.
Adams was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in a prosperous neighborhood in South Boston, the last child in a gifted family that included Adams's three older sisters (two went to Radcliffe College and one to Smith College). Adams was part of the prominent Adams family, and was descended from John Adams's grandfather.
Adams attending Boston Latin School and Cambridge Latin High School (now called Cambridge Rindge and Latin). In 1900, the family moved to Cambridge, which was closer to the two colleges.
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Roger Guillemin
Roger Charles Louis Guillemin (born January 11, 1924 in Dijon, Bourgogne, France) received the National Medal of Science in 1976, and the Nobel prize for medicine in 1977 for his work on neurohormones, sharing the prize that year with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow.
Completing his undergraduate work at the University of Burgundy, Guillemin received his M.D. degree from the Medical Faculty at Lyon in 1949, and went to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to work with Hans Selye at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal where he received a Ph.D. in 1953. The same year he moved to the United States to join the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine at Houston. In 1965, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1970 he helped in creating the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California where he worked until retirement in 1989.
Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally discovered the structures of TRH and GnRH in separate laboratories. The process of this scientific discovery at Guillemin's laboratory is the subject of a study by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, published as Laboratory Life.
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Roger Revelle
Roger Randall Dougan Revelle (March 7, 1909 — July 15, 1991) was a scientist and scholar who was instrumental in the formative years of the University of California, San Diego and was one of the first scientists to study global warming and the movement of Earth's tectonic plates. UC San Diego's first college is named Revelle College in his honor.
Roger Revelle was born in Seattle to William Roger Revelle and Ella Dougan, and grew up in southern California, graduating from Pomona College in 1929 with early studies in geology and then earning a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California, Berkeley in 1936. While at Cal, he studied under Dr. George D. Louderback and was initiated into Theta Tau Professional Engineering Fraternity which started as a mining engineering fraternity and maintained a strong affinity for geology and geological engineering students. Much of his early work in oceanography took place at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in San Diego. He was also Oceanographer for the Navy during WWII. He became director of SIO from 1950 to 1964. He stood against the UC faculty being required to take an anti-communist oath during the Joseph McCarthy period. He served as Science Advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall during the Kennedy Administration in the early 1960s, and was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1974).
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Roger Shepard
Roger Newland Shepard (born January 30, 1929 in Palo Alto, California) is a cognitive scientist and author of Toward a Universal Law of Generalization for Psychological Science. He is seen as a father of research on spatial relations.
Shepard obtained his Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University in 1955 under Carl Hovland, and completed post-doctoral training with George Armitage Miller at Harvard. Subsequent to this, Shepard was at Bell Labs and then a professor at Harvard before joining the faculty at Stanford University. In 1995, Shepard received the National Medal of Science for his contributions in the field of cognitive science. In 2006, he also won the Rumelhart Prize. Shepard is Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Stanford University.
His students include Lynn Cooper, Leda Cosmides, Rob Fish, Jennifer Freyd, Carol Krumhansl, Daniel Levitin, Geoffrey Miller and Josh Tenenbaum.
Shepard is one of the founders of the Kira Institute.
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Ronald Breslow
Ronald C. D. Breslow (born March 14, 1931) is an American chemist from Rahway, New Jersey. He is currently University Professor at Columbia University, where he is based in the Department of Chemistry and affiliated with the Departments of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology; he has also been on the faculty of its Department of Chemical Engineering. He has taught at Columbia since 1956 and is a former chair of the university's chemistry department.
He is interested in the design and synthesis of new molecules with interesting properties, and the study of these properties. Examples include the cyclopropenyl cation, the simplest aromatic system and the first aromatic compound prepared with other than six electrons in a ring. His seminal contributions concerning the mechanism of the vitamin B1 catalyzed benzoin condensation and the rate enhancement gained by performing organic transformations on water, among many others, sparked new avenues of chemical research.
Breslow earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where his doctoral advisor was R. B. Woodward. Among Breslow's former Ph.D. students is Robert Grubbs, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2005, and Doug La Follette, Secretary of State of Wisconsin.
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Ronald Coifman
Ronald Raphael Coifman is the Phillips Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Coifman graduated from the University of Geneva in 1965.
Coifman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the 1996 DARPA Sustained Excellence Award, the 1996 Connecticut Science Medal, the 1999 Pioneer Award of the International Society for Industrial and Applied Science, and the 1999 National Medal of Science.
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Rudolf Kompfner
Rudolf Kompfner (May 16, 1909 – December 3, 1977) was an Austrian-born engineer and physicist, best known as the inventor of the traveling-wave tube (TWT).
Kompfner was born in Vienna to Jewish parents. He was originally trained as an architect and after receiving his university degree in 1933 he moved to England (due to the rise of anti-Semitism) where he worked as an architect until 1941. However, he had a strong interest in physics and electronics, and after being briefly detained by the British as an enemy alien at the start of World War II he was recruited to work in a secret microwave vacuum tube research program at the University of Birmingham. While there, Kompfner invented the TWT in 1943. After the war he became a British citizen, continued working for the Admiralty as a scientist, and also studied physics at the University of Oxford, receiving his PhD in 1951.
Late that year Dr. Kompfner was recruited to Bell Labs in the United States by John R. Pierce, where they together developed the TWT into an important element of the communications age. He received the IEEE Medal of Honor for his invention, and in 1974 received the National Medal of Science.
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Ruth Patrick
Dr. Ruth Myrtle Patrick (born November 26, 1907) is a botanist and limnologist specializing in diatoms and freshwater ecology, who developed ways to measure the health of freshwater ecosystems and established a number of research facilities. She attended the Sunset Hill School in Kansas City, Missouri, graduating in 1925. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia in 1934. Her work has been widely published and she has received numerous awards for her scientific achievements, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences in 1993, the National Medal of Science in 1996, the Heinz Award Chairman's Medal in 2002, and the A.C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. The Ruth Patrick Science Education Center is named after her. This botanist is denoted by the author abbreviation R.M.Patrick when citing a botanical name.
On November 17, 2007, a gala was held in honor of Dr. Patrick's upcoming 100th birthday at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, PA. Notable guests included Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell.[citation needed]
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Saharon Shelah
Saharon Shelah (Hebrew: שהרן שלח) (1945 – ) is an Israeli mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Shelah was born in Jerusalem on July 3, 1945. He is the son of the Israeli poet and political activist Yonatan Ratosh. He received his PhD in 1969 from the Hebrew University.
Shelah is married to Yael, and has three children.
Shelah is one of the most prolific contemporary mathematicians. As of 2012, he has published around 1000 mathematical papers (together with over 220 co-authors). His main interests lie in mathematical logic, model theory in particular, and in axiomatic set theory.
In model theory, he developed the classification theory, which led him to a solution of Morley's problem. In set theory, he invented the notion of proper forcing, an important tool in iterated forcing arguments. With PCF theory, he showed that in spite of the undecidability of the most basic questions of cardinal arithmetic (such as the continuum hypothesis), there are still highly nontrivial ZFC theorems about cardinal exponentiation. Shelah constructed a Kurosh monster, an uncountable group for which every proper subgroup is countable. He showed that Whitehead's problem is independent of ZFC. He gave the first primitive recursive upper bound to van der Waerden's numbers V(C,N). He extended Arrow's impossibility theorem on voting systems.
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Salvador Luria
Salvador Edward Luria (Turin, August 13, 1912 – Lexington, February 6, 1991) was an Italian microbiologist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey, for showing that bacterial resistance to viruses (phages) is genetically inherited. He found that bacterial resistance was caused by restriction enzymes, which cut viral DNA at sequences that are specific to viruses and not found in the bacteria.
Luria was born Salvatore Edoardo Luria in Turin, Italy to an influential Italian Sephardic Jewish family. He attended the medical school at the University of Turin studying with Giuseppe Levi. There, he met two other future Nobel laureates: Rita Levi-Montalcini and Renato Dulbecco. He graduated from the University of Turin in 1935. From 1936 to 1937, Luria served his required time in the Italian army as a medical officer. He then took classes in radiology at the University of Rome. Here, he was introduced to Max Delbrück's theories on the gene as a molecule and began to formulate methods for testing genetic theory with the bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria.
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Samuel Eilenberg
Samuel Eilenberg (September 30, 1913 – January 30, 1998) was a Polish and American mathematician of Jewish descent. He was born in Warsaw, Russian Empire (now in Poland) and died in New York City, USA, where he had spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University.
He earned his Ph.D. from University of Warsaw in 1936. His thesis advisor was Karol Borsuk. His main interest was algebraic topology. He worked on the axiomatic treatment of homology theory with Norman Steenrod (whose names the Eilenberg–Steenrod axioms bear), and on homological algebra with Saunders Mac Lane. In the process, Eilenberg and Mac Lane created category theory.
Eilenberg was a member of Bourbaki and with Henri Cartan, wrote the 1956 book Homological Algebra, which became a classic.
Later in life he worked mainly in pure category theory, being one of the founders of the field. The Eilenberg swindle (or telescope) is a construction applying the telescoping cancellation idea to projective modules.
Eilenberg also wrote an important book on automata theory. The X-machine, a form of automaton, was introduced by Eilenberg in 1974.
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Samuel Goudsmit
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (The Hague, July 11, 1902 — Reno, December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.
Goudsmit studied physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1927. After receiving his PhD, Goudsmit served as a Professor at the University of Michigan between 1927 and 1946. In 1930 he co-authored a text with Linus Pauling titled The Structure of Line Spectra. During World War II he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Samuel Karlin
Samuel Karlin (June 8, 1924 - December 18, 2007) was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.
Karlin was born in Yanova, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life.
Karlin earned his undergraduate degree from Illinois Institute of Technology; and then his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1947 (at the age of 22) under the supervision of Salomon Bochner. He was on the faculty of Caltech from 1948–56, before becoming a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford.
Throughout his career, Karlin made fundamental contributions to the fields of mathematical economics, bioinformatics, game theory, evolutionary theory, biomolecular sequence analysis, and total positivity. He did extensive work in mathematical population genetics. In the early 1990s, Karlin and Stephen Altschul developed the Karlin-Altschul statistics, a basis for the highly used sequence similarity software program BLAST.
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Saul Winstein
Saul Winstein (October 8, 1912 – November 23, 1969) was the Canadian chemist who discovered the Winstein reaction, in which he argued a non-classical cation was needed to explain the stability of the norbornyl cation. This fueled a debate with Herbert C. Brown over the existence of delocalized cations such as this. Richard F. Heck, who earlier in his career had undertaken postgraduate studies with Winstein, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Co-author of the Grunwald-Winstein equation concerning solvolysis rates.
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Severo Ochoa
Severo Ochoa de Albornoz (Luarca, September 24, 1905 – Madrid, November 1, 1993) was a Spanish-American doctor and biochemist, and joint winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arthur Kornberg.
Severo Ochoa was born in Luarca (Asturias), Spain. His father was Severo Manuel Ochoa, a lawyer and businessman, and his mother was Carmen de Albornoz. Ochoa was the nephew of Alvaro de Albornoz (President of the Second Spanish Republic in exile, 1947–1951), and a cousin of the poet and literary poet and critic Aurora de Albornoz. His father died when Ochoa was seven, and he and his mother moved to Málaga, where he attended elementary school through high school. His interest in biology was stimulated by the publications of the Spanish neurologist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal. In 1923, he went to the University of Madrid Medical School, where he hoped to work with Cajal, but Cajal retired. He studied with father Pedro Arrupe, and Juan Negrín was his teacher.
Negrín encouraged Ochoa and another student, José Valdecasas, to isolate creatinine from urine. The two students succeeded and also developed a method to measure small levels of muscle creatinine. Ochoa spent the summer of 1927 in Glasgow working with D. Noel Paton on creatine metabolism improving his English skills. During the summer he refined the assay procedure further and upon returning to Spain he and Valdecasas submitted a paper describing the work to the Journal of Biological Chemistry, where it was rapidly accepted [Ochoa, S., and Valdecasas, J. G. (1929) A micromethod for the estimation of total creatinine in muscle. J. Biol. Chem. 81: 351–357], marking the beginning of Ochoa's biochemistry career.
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Sewall Wright
Sewall Green Wright (December 21, 1889 – March 3, 1988) was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. With R. A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, he was a founder of theoretical population genetics. He is the discoverer of the inbreeding coefficient and of methods of computing it in pedigrees. He extended this work to populations, computing the amount of inbreeding of members of populations as a result of random genetic drift, and he and Fisher pioneered methods for computing the distribution of gene frequencies among populations as a result of the interaction of natural selection, mutation, migration and genetic drift. The work of Fisher, Wright, and Haldane on theoretical population genetics was a major step in the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis of genetics with evolution. Wright also made major contributions to mammalian genetics and biochemical genetics.
Sewall Wright was born in Melrose, Massachusetts to Philip Green Wright and Elizabeth Quincy Sewall Wright. His parents were first cousins, an interesting fact in light of Wright's later research on inbreeding. The family moved three years later after Philip accepted a teaching job at Lombard College, a Universalist college in Galesburg, Illinois.
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Seymour Benzer
Seymour Benzer (October 15, 1921 – November 30, 2007) was an American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist. His career began during the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s, and he eventually rose to prominence in the fields of molecular and behavioral genetics. He led a productive genetics research lab both at Purdue University and as the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology.
Benzer was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to Meyer B. and Eva Naidorf (from Poland). He had two older sisters, and his parents favored him as the only boy. One of Benzer's earliest scientific experiences was dissecting frogs he had caught as a boy. In an interview at Caltech, Benzer also remembered receiving a microscope for his 13th birthday, “and that opened up the whole world.” The book "Arrowsmith" by Sinclair Lewis heavily influenced the young Benzer, and he even imitated the handwriting of Max Gottlieb, a scientist character in the novel. Benzer graduated from high school at 15 years old.
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Simon Ramo
Simon "Si" Ramo (born May 7, 1913) is an American physicist, engineer, and business leader. He led development of microwave and missile technology and is sometimes known as the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). He has been partly responsible for the creation of two Fortune 500 companies of the 1970s; Ramo-Wooldridge (TRW after 1958) and Bunker-Ramo (now part of Honeywell).
Ramo was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is of Sephardic descent. (His family later settled in Eastern Europe and immigrated to the United States). He entered the University of Utah at the age of 16, and earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. By 1936, at the age of twenty-three, he had earned dual PhD degrees from Caltech in Physics and Electrical Engineering.
From 1936 until 1946 he led electronics research at General Electric. He became globally recognized as a leader in Microwave research and headed the development of GE’s Electron microscope. He also published textbooks on Fields and Waves in Modern Radio (1944) and Introduction to Microwaves (1945).
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Solomon Lefschetz
Solomon Lefschetz (3 September 1884 – 5 October 1972) was an American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ordinary differential equations.
He was born in Moscow into a Jewish family (his parents were Turkish citizens) who moved shortly after that to Paris. He was educated there in engineering at the École Centrale Paris, but emigrated to the USA in 1905.
He was badly injured in an industrial accident in 1907, losing both hands. He moved towards mathematics, receiving a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. He then took positions in University of Nebraska and University of Kansas, moving to Princeton University in 1924, where he was soon given a permanent position. He remained there until 1953.
In the application of topology to algebraic geometry, he followed the work of Charles Émile Picard, whom he had heard lecture in Paris at the École Centrale Paris. He proved theorems on the topology of hyperplane sections of algebraic varieties, which provide a basic inductive tool (these are now seen as allied to Morse theory, though a Lefschetz pencil of hyperplane sections is a more subtle system than a Morse function because hyperplanes intersect each other). The Picard-Lefschetz formula in the theory of vanishing cycles is a basic tool relating the degeneration of families of varieties with 'loss' of topology, to monodromy. His book L'analysis situs et la géométrie algébrique from 1924, though opaque foundationally given the current technical state of homology theory, was in the long term very influential (one could say that it was one of the sources for the eventual proof of the Weil conjectures, through SGA7). In 1924 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis.
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Stanley Norman Cohen
Stanley Norman Cohen (born June 30, 1935 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American geneticist.
Cohen is a graduate of Rutgers University, and received his doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1960. Following subsequent training at various institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, he joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1968.
It was there that he began to explore the field of bacterial plasmids. He wanted to understand how the genes of plasmids could make bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Cohen's investigations in 1972, combined with those of Paul Berg and Herbert Boyer, led to the development of methods to combine and transplant genes. This discovery signaled the birth of genetic engineering and earned Cohen the National Medal of Science in 1988. He also co-authored (with Royston C. Clowes, Roy Curtiss III, Naomi Datta, Stanley Falkow and Richard Novick) a proposal for uniform nomenclature for bacterial plasmids.
Today, Cohen is a professor of genetics and medicine at Stanford, where he works on a variety of scientific problems including cell growth and development.
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Stephen Cole Kleene
Stephen Cole Kleene (January 5, 1909, Hartford, Connecticut, United States – January 25, 1994, Madison, Wisconsin) was an American mathematician who helped lay the foundations for theoretical computer science. One of many distinguished students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory. Kleene's work grounds the study of which functions are computable. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star (Kleene closure), Kleene's recursion theorem and the Kleene fixpoint theorem. He also invented regular expressions, and was a leading American advocate of mathematical intuitionism.
Kleene pronounced his last name /ˈkleɪniː/ KLAY-nee. Commonplace mispronunciations include /ˈkliːniː/ and /ˈkliːn/. (His son, Ken Kleene, wrote: "As far as I am aware this pronunciation is incorrect in all known languages. I believe that this novel pronunciation was invented by my father.")[citation needed]
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Stephen Smale
Steven Smale a.k.a. Steve Smale, Stephen Smale (born July 15, 1930) is an American mathematician from Flint, Michigan. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966, and spent more than three decades on the mathematics faculty of the University of California, Berkeley (1960–61 and 1964–1995).
He entered the University of Michigan in 1948. Initially, Smale was a good student, placing into an honors calculus sequence taught by Bob Thrall and earning himself A's. However, his sophomore and junior years were marred with mediocre grades, mostly Bs, Cs and even an F in nuclear physics. However, with some luck, Smale was accepted as a graduate student at the University of Michigan's mathematics department. Yet again, Smale performed poorly his first years, earning a C average as a graduate student. It was only when the department chair, Hildebrant, threatened to kick out Smale, that he began to work hard[citation needed]. Smale finally earned his Ph.D. in 1957, under Raoul Bott.
Smale began his career as an instructor at the college at the University of Chicago. In 1958, he astounded the mathematical world with a proof of a sphere eversion. He then cemented his reputation with a proof of the Poincaré conjecture for all dimensions greater than or equal to 5; he later generalized the ideas in a 107 page paper that established the h-cobordism theorem.
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Steven Kleiman
Steven Lawrence Kleiman (born 31 March 1942) is an American mathematician.
He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in Boston, he did his undergraduate studies at the MIT. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1965, after studying there with Oscar Zariski and David Mumford, and joined the MIT faculty in 1969. In 1989 the University of Copenhagen awarded him an honorary doctorate and in May 2002 the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters hosted a conference in honor of his 60th birthday and elected him as a foreign member. That same year Kleiman was elected foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Kleiman held the prestigious NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship (1966-1967), Sloan Fellowship (1968), and Guggenheim Fellowship (1979).
Kleiman is known for his work in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. He has made seminal contributions in motivic cohomology, moduli theory, intersection theory and enumerative geometry. A study of academic collaborations in enumerative geometry found that he was not only the most prolific author in that area, but also the one with the most collaborative ties, and the most central author of the field in terms of closeness centrality; the study's authors proposed to name the collaboration graph of the field in his honor.
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Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City to Jewish immigrants Frederick and Eva Weinberg. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950 in the same graduating class as Sheldon Glashow, whose own research, independent of Weinberg's, would result in them (and Abdus Salam) sharing the same 1979 Nobel in Physics (see below).
Weinberg received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1954, living at the Cornell branch of the Telluride Association. He left Cornell and went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where he started his graduate studies and research. After one year, Weinberg returned to Princeton University where he earned his Ph.D. degree in Physics in 1957, studying under Sam Treiman. Weinberg is an atheist.
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Susan Solomon
Susan Solomon (born 1956 in Chicago) is an atmospheric chemist working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Solomon was one of the first to propose chlorofluorocarbons as the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole.
Solomon is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Sciences of France.
Solomon began her interest in science as a child watching The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. In high school she placed third in a national science fair, with a project that measured the percent of oxygen in a gas mixture.
Solomon received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1977. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981, where she specialized in atmospheric chemistry.
Solomon married Barry Sidwell in 1988.
Solomon is the head of the Chemistry and Climate Processes Group of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Division.
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Theodore von Kármán
Theodore von Kármán (original Hungarian name: Szőllőskislaki Kármán Tódor) (May 11, 1881 – May 7, 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization. He is regarded as the outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the twentieth century.
Von Kármán was born into a Jewish family at Budapest, Austria-Hungary as Kármán Tódor. One of his ancestors was Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. He studied engineering at the city's Royal Joseph Technical University, known today as Budapest University of Technology and Economics. After graduating in 1902 he moved to Germany and joined Ludwig Prandtl at the University of Göttingen, and received his doctorate in 1908. He taught at Göttingen for four years. In 1912 accepted a position as director of the Aeronautical Institute at RWTH Aachen, one of the country's leading universities. His time at RWTH Aachen was interrupted by service in the Austro-Hungarian Army 1915–1918, where he designed an early helicopter. He is believed to have founded the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in September 1922 by organizing its first conference in Innsbruck. He left RWTH Aachen in 1930.
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Thomas Cech
Thomas Robert Cech (born December 8, 1947 in Chicago) is a chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel prize in chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, which showed that life could have started as RNA. He also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT (telomerase reverse transcriptase), which is part of the process of restoring telomeres after they are shortened during cell division. As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado.
Cech was born to parents of Czech origin (his grandfather was Czech, his other grandparents were first-generation Americans) in Chicago, he grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. In junior high school, he knocked on the doors of geology professors at the University of Iowa, and asked them to discuss crystal structures, meteorites and fossils.
In 1966, he entered Grinnell College where he studied Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, constitutional history and chemistry. He married his organic chemistry lab partner, Carol Lynn Martinson, and graduated with a B.A. in 1970.
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Thomas Eisner
Thomas Eisner (June 25, 1929 – March 25, 2011) was a German-American entomologist and ecologist, known as the "father of chemical ecology." He was a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University, and Director of the Cornell Institute for Research in Chemical Ecology (CIRCE). He was a world authority on animal behavior, ecology, and evolution, and, together with his Cornell colleague, Jerrold Meinwald, was one of the pioneers of chemical ecology, the discipline dealing with the chemical interactions of organisms. He was author or co-author of some 400 scientific articles and seven books.
Thomas Eisner was born on June 25, 1929 in Berlin, Germany. His father Hans Eisner, of Jewish origin, was the chemist and a coworker of Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Electrochemistry in Berlin, later held a chair for chemistry at Cornell. His mother was an artist Margarete Heil-Eisner. Escaping the Nazi regime, the family moved to Barcelona and, following the civil war there, to Uruguay. The Eisners came to the U.S. in 1947.
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Thomas Starzl
Thomas E. Starzl (born March 11, 1926) is an American physician, researcher, and is an expert on organ transplants. He performed the first human liver transplants, and has often been referred to as "the father of modern transplantation."
Starzl was born on March 11, 1926 in Le Mars, Iowa, the son of newspaper editor and science fiction writer Roman Frederick Starzl. Originally intending to become a priest in his teenage years, Starzl's plans changed drastically when his mother died from breast cancer. He attended Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. Starzl attended Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, where in 1950 he received a Master of Science degree in anatomy and in 1952 earned both a Ph.D. in neurophysiology and an M.D. with distinction.
Starzl was a surgeon and researcher in the then nascent field of organ transplantation at the University of Colorado from 1962 until his move to the University of Pittsburgh in 1981, where he has remained since. He made an exceptional mark on the medical community creating new surgical techniques. He reportedly worked up to three days straight on organ transplantation procedures as he was the only one who could perform them.
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Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( /væˈniːvɑr/ van-NEE-var; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator known for his work on analog computers, his role as an initiator and administrator of the Manhattan Project, as the founder of Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer analogous to the structure of the World Wide Web. He is credited with inspiring the creation of the New Media.
For his master's thesis, Bush invented and patented a "profile tracer", a device for assisting surveyors that mapped the terrain over which it traveled. It was the first of a string of inventions. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919, and founded the company now known as Raytheon in 1922. Starting in 1927, Bush constructed a differential analyzer, an analog computer with some digital components that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. An offshoot of the work at MIT by Bush and others was the beginning of digital circuit design theory. Bush became Vice President of MIT and Dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938.
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Vera Rubin
Vera (Cooper) Rubin (born (1928-07-23) July 23, 1928 (age 83)) is an American astronomer. She pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She is famous for uncovering the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion, by studying galactic rotation curves. This phenomenon became known as the galaxy rotation problem.
Vera Rubin can be seen on the BBC documentary Most of Our Universe is Missing.
Currently, the theory of dark matter is the most popular candidate for explaining the galaxy rotation problem. The alternative theory of MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) has little support in the community. Rubin, however, supports the MOND approach, stating "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances. That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
After she had earned an A.B. from Vassar College (1948), she tried to enroll at Princeton but never received their graduate catalog as women there were not allowed in the graduate astronomy program until 1975. She applied to Cornell University, where she studied physics under Philip Morrison, Richard Feynman, and Hans Bethe. There she earned an M.A. in 1951. Then in 1954 at Georgetown University she earned a Ph.D.
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Viktor Hamburger
Viktor Hamburger (July 9, 1900 – June 12, 2001) was a German professor and embryologist. Hamburger lectured, among others, Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909 - ), who identified nerve growth factor along with Hamburger when they collaborated. Hamburger retired from his professor position in 1969 and continued researching until the 1980s.
In the 1960s, Hamburger did embryological work to get at the question of what comes first, sensation or movement, a chicken and egg problem to be sure.
Obituary, New York Times, June 14, 2001.
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Vladimir Arnold
Vladimir Igorevich Arnold (alternative spelling Arnol'd, Russian: Влади́мир И́горевич Арно́льд, 12 June 1937 – 3 June 2010) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. While he is best known for the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem regarding the stability of integrable Hamiltonian systems, he made important contributions in several areas including dynamical systems theory, catastrophe theory, topology, algebraic geometry, classical mechanics and singularity theory, including posing the ADE classification problem, since his first main result—the partial solution of Hilbert's thirteenth problem in 1957 at the age of 19.
While a student of Andrey Kolmogorov at Moscow State University and still a teenager, Arnold showed in 1957 that any continuous function of several variables can be constructed with a finite number of two-variable functions, thereby partially solving Hilbert's thirteenth problem.
After graduating from Moscow State University in 1959, he worked there until 1986 (a professor since 1965), and then at Steklov Mathematical Institute.
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Vladimir Haensel
Vladimir Haensel (1 September 1914 – 15 December 2002) was an American chemical engineer who invented the platforming process - a platinum catalytic process for reforming petroleum hydrocarbons into gasoline. In addition, he was influential in the creation of catalytic converters for automobiles.
Haensel was born 1 September 1914 in Freiburg, Germany, but grew up in Moscow where his father Paul Haensel was a university professor of economics. He came to the USA in 1930 when his father took up an academic position. He received a BS degree in general engineering from Northwestern University, and a Master's in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1937, joining the Universal Oil Products Company (UOP) the same year. While there he worked for a Ph.D. in chemistry from Northwestern University, which was awarded in 1941.
Following World War II, Dr. Haensel went to Europe under the auspices of the U.S. Petroleum Administration for War to evaluate German research on synthetic fuels.
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Walter Kohn
Walter Kohn (born March 9, 1923, in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to incorporate quantum mechanical effects in the electronic density (rather than through its many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to many insights and became an essential tool for electronic materials, atomic and molecular structure.
Kohn arrived in England as part of the famous Kindertransport rescue operation, immediately after the annexation of Austria by Hitler. He is from a Jewish family, both of his parents were later killed in the Holocaust. Because he was a German national, he was sent to Canada by the English in July 1940. As a 17-year-old, Kohn traveled as part of a British convoy moving through U-boat-infested waters to Quebec City in Canada; and from there, by train, to a camp in Trois-Rivières. He was at first held in detention in a camp near Sherbrooke, Quebec. This camp, as well as others, provided a small number of educational facilities that Kohn used to the fullest, and he finally succeeded in entering the University of Toronto. As a German national, the future Nobel laureate in chemistry was not allowed to enter the chemistry building, and so he opted for physics and mathematics. A short but fascinating autobiography may be found on the Nobelist webpage.
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Walter Munk
Walter Heinrich Munk (born October 19, 1917) is an American physical oceanographer. He is professor of geophysics emeritus and holds the Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
Born in 1917 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, Munk was sent to a boys' preparatory school in upper New York state in 1932. The family selected New York because they envisioned a career in finance for Munk in a New York bank with connections to the family business. His father, Dr. Hans Munk, and his mother, Rega Brunner, divorced when Munk was a child. His maternal grandfather was a prominent banker and Austrian politician, Lucian Brunner (1850–1914). His stepfather, Dr. Rudolf Engelsberg, was briefly a member of the Austrian government of President Engelbert Dollfuss.
Munk worked at the firm for three years and studied at Columbia University. He hated banking, and left the firm to attend the California Institute of Technology, where he earned a B.S. (1939) in physics. He applied for a summer job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The next year the director of the Scripps, the distinguished Norwegian oceanographer Harald Ulrik Sverdrup, accepted him as a doctoral student, but told Munk that he did "not know of a single job in oceanography which would become available in the next decade".
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Wernher von Braun
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherrvon Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was a German-born rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and, subsequently, the United States.
In his 20s and early 30s, von Braun was the central figure in Germany's rocket development program, responsible for the design and realization of the V-2 combat rocket during World War II. After the war, he and some of his rocket team were taken to the United States as part of the then-secret Operation Paperclip. Von Braun worked on the United States Army intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) program before his group was assimilated by NASA, under which he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. According to one NASA source, he is "without doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history". His crowning achievement was to lead the development of the Saturn V booster rocket that helped land the first men on the Moon in July 1969. In 1975 he received the National Medal of Science.
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Wikipedia Persondata
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William Cumming Rose
William Cumming Rose (April 4, 1887 – September 25, 1985) was an American nutritionist whose research in the 1930s discovered the essential amino acid threonine.
He graduated with a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1911. Rose served in several academic posts before accepting a position at the University of Texas Galveston Medical School to organize a department of biochemistry. In 1922, he went to the University of Illinois as professor of physiological chemistry, a title which was changed to professor of biochemistry in 1936. From 1922 to 1955 he transformed his department into a center of excellence for the training of biochemists. He retired from the University of Illinois in 1955.
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William Feller
William "Vilim" Feller (July 7, 1906 – January 14, 1970), born Vilibald Srećko Feller, was a Croatian-American mathematician specializing in probability theory.
Feller was born in Zagreb to Ida Oemichen-Perc, a Croatian-Austrian Catholic, and Eugen Victor Feller, who was born to a Polish Jew named David Feller and an Austrian named Elsa Holzer. Eugen was a famous chemist and created Elsa fluid named after his mother. According to Gian-Carlo Rota, Feller's father's surname was a "Slavic tongue twister", which William changed at the age of twenty—but as can be seen, this claim was false. His christened name, Vilibald, was chosen by his Catholic mother for the saint day of his birthday. In his school documentation, the small municipality of Donja Stubica in Zagorje is mentioned. This is the birthplace of his father, who was an apothecary and owner of a company producing hygienic utensils and cosmetics.
William finished his elementary and middle education in Zagreb, as well as two years of his math study. From 1925, he continued his study in Göttingen, Germany where he gained the doctoral degree in 1926 under the supervision of Richard Courant, with his work Über algebraisch rektifizierbare transzendente Kurven.
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William Kaye Estes
William Kaye Estes (June 17, 1919 – August 17, 2011) was an American psychologist. As an undergraduate, he was a student of Richard M. Elliott at the University of Minnesota. As a graduate student he stayed at the University of Minnesota, and worked under B. F. Skinner with whom he developed the Conditioned Suppression paradigm (Estes & Skinner, 1941). After he received his doctorate, he joined Skinner on the faculty at Indiana University. After Estes got out of the U. S. Army at the end of World War II, he established his reputation as one of the originators of mathematical learning theory. Estes went from Indiana University to Stanford University, to Rockefeller University in New York, and finally to Harvard University. While, teaching at Harvard University Estes contributed as a instituting first editor of the journal of Psychological Science for the Association for Psychological Science. After retiring from Harvard, he returned to Bloomington, Indiana, where he remained active in academics to become professor emeritus at his original academic home department. One of William Estes's most famous contributions to learning theory was stimulus-sampling theory, which conceives of learning as establishing associations to hypothetical stimulus elements that are randomly drawn from a pool of elements that characterize a particular learning situation. This theory predicted probability matching, which has been found in a wide range of tasks for many different organisms. Estes has had a major influence on theories of learning and memory, both in his own theorizing and in the theories of his many students and collaborators. In honor of his impact within the field of psychology, Estes received the National Medal of Science on December 16, 1997 from President Bill Clinton.
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Yakir Aharonov
Yakir Aharonov (Hebrew: יקיר אהרונוב; born 1932 in Haifa, Israel) is an Israeli physicist specializing in quantum physics. He is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and the James J. Farley Professor of Natural Philosophy at Chapman University in California. He is also a distinguished professor in Perimeter Institute. He also serves as a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He is president of the IYAR, The Israeli Institute for Advanced Research.
His research interests are nonlocal and topological effects in quantum mechanics, quantum field theories and interpretations of quantum mechanics. In 1959, he and David Bohm proposed the Aharonov–Bohm effect for which he co-received the 1998 Wolf Prize.
In 1988 Aharonov et al. published their theory of weak measurement, which doesn't disturb the quantum state being observed. This work was motivated by Aharonov's long time quest to experimentally verify his theory that apparently random events in quantum mechanics are caused by events in the future (two-state vector formalism). Verifying a present effect of a future cause requires a measurement, which would ordinarily destroy coherence and ruin the experiment. He and his colleagues were able to make weak measurements and verify the present effect of the future cause.
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Yoichiro Nambu
Yoichiro Nambu (南部 陽一郎, Nambu Yōichirō?, born January 18, 1921) is a Japanese-born American physicist, currently a professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded a one-half share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. The other half share was split equally between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
Nambu was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1921. After graduating from the then Fukui Secondary High School in Fukui City, he enrolled in the Tokyo Imperial University and studied physics. He received his B.S. in 1942 and D.Sc. in 1952. In 1949 he was appointed to associate professor at the Osaka City University and promoted to professorship the next year at the age of 29.
In 1952, he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, to study. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1954 and was promoted to professor in 1958. From 1974 to 1977 he was also Chairman of the Department of Physics. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970.
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photo: AP / Menahem Kahana
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JERUSALEM (Reuters) - It's Bibi against the world on a campaign trail that took the combative Israeli prime minister to a Jewish settlement on Tuesday. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem December 9, 2012. REUTERS/Ammar Awad ... Tweaking his message to match the locality, Netanyahu said ... The danger comes from Iran, which is building nuclear weapons." ... CHEMICAL WEAPONS ... ....(size: 3.8Kb)
photo: AP / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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MOSCOW, January 8 (RIA Novosti) – At least 17 billion Earth-size planets may inhabit the Milky Way galaxy, SPACE.com reported citing a new study by US astronomers ... That translates to a minimum of 17 billion planets as there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way ... Over a hundred of candidates have been confirmed as planets so far, NASA said....(size: 1.7Kb)
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07 Jan 2013
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. When Congress granted President Lyndon B. Johnson absolute powers to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression," Congress could have also included "all necessary vanities." The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which greatly escalated a foreign imperial war in Vietnam, added fuel to the bonfires of vanity....(size: 5.2Kb)
Indian Express
18 Dec 2010
As a young man, Shreeram Abhyankar would write love letters to his wife-to-be ... Abhyankar was felicitated in a traditional way with a memento and a shawl ... Born in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, Abhyankar had an outstanding career and has obtained his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1955 under the supervision of Oscar Zariski, an algebraic geometer. Ads by Google ... ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)
| Oscar Zariski | |
|---|---|
 Oscar Zariski (1899–1986) |
|
| Born | (1899-04-24)April 24, 1899 Kobrin, Russian Empire |
| Died | July 4, 1986(1986-07-04) (aged 87) Brookline, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Johns Hopkins University University of Illinois Harvard University |
| Alma mater | University of Rome University of Kiev |
| Doctoral advisor | Guido Castelnuovo |
| Doctoral students | S. S. Abhyankar Michael Artin Iacopo Barsotti Irvin Cohen Daniel Gorenstein Robin Hartshorne Heisuke Hironaka Steven Kleiman Joseph Lipman David Mumford Maxwell Rosenlicht Pierre Samuel Abraham Seidenberg |
| Known for | Algebraic geometry |
| Notable awards | Wolf Prize in Mathematics, Steele Prize |
Oscar Zariski (born Oscher Zaritsky April 24, 1899, in Kobrin, Russian Empire (today Belarus), died July 4, 1986, Brookline, Massachusetts) was a Russian mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.
Contents |
Education[link]
Zariski was born Oscher (also transliterated as Ascher or Osher) Zaritsky to a Jewish family (his parents were Bezalel Zaritsky and Hanna Tennenbaum) and in 1918 studied at the University of Kiev. He left Kiev in 1920 to study in Rome where he became a disciple of the Italian school of algebraic geometry, studying with Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi.
Zariski wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1924 on a topic in Galois theory. At the time of his dissertation publication, he changed his name for professional purposes to Oscar Zariski.
Johns Hopkins University years[link]
Zariski emigrated to the United States in 1927 supported by Solomon Lefschetz. He had a position at Johns Hopkins University where he became professor in 1937. During this period, he wrote Algebraic Surfaces as a summation of the work of the Italian school. The book was published in 1935 and reissued 36 years later, with detailed notes by Zariski's students that illustrated how the field of algebraic geometry had changed. It is still an important reference.
It seems to have been this work that set the seal of Zariski's discontent with the approach of the Italians to birational geometry. The question of rigour he addressed by recourse to commutative algebra. The Zariski topology, as it was later known, is adequate for biregular geometry, where varieties are mapped by polynomial functions. That theory is too limited for algebraic surfaces, and even for curves with singular points. A rational map is to a regular map as a rational function is to a polynomial: it may be indeterminate at some points. In geometric terms, one has to work with functions defined on some open, dense set of a given variety. The description of the behaviour on the complement may require infinitely near points to be introduced to account for limiting behaviour along different directions. This introduces a need, in the surface case, to use also valuation theory to describe the phenomena such as blowing up (balloon-style, rather than explosively).
Harvard University years[link]
After spending a year 1946–1947 at the University of Illinois, Zariski became professor at Harvard University in 1947 where he remained until his retirement in 1969. In 1945, he fruitfully discussed foundational matters for algebraic geometry with André Weil. Weil's interest was in putting an abstract variety theory in place, to support the use of the Jacobian variety in his proof of the Riemann hypothesis for curves over finite fields, a direction rather oblique to Zariski's interests. The two sets of foundations weren't reconciled at that point.
At Harvard, Zariski's students included Shreeram Abhyankar, Heisuke Hironaka, David Mumford, Michael Artin and Steven Kleiman — thus spanning the main areas of advance in singularity theory, moduli theory and cohomology in the next generation. Zariski himself worked on equisingularity theory. Some of his major results, Zariski's main theorem and the Zariski theorem on holomorphic functions, were amongst the results generalized and included in the programme of Alexander Grothendieck that ultimately unified algebraic geometry.
Zariski proposed the first example of a Zariski surface in 1958.
Awards and recognition[link]
Zariski was awarded the Steele Prize in 1981, and in the same year the Wolf Prize in Mathematics with Lars Ahlfors. He wrote also Commutative Algebra in two volumes, with Pierre Samuel. His papers have been published by MIT Press, in four volumes.
See also[link]
- Zariski ring
- Zariski tangent space
- Zariski surface
- Zariski topology
- Zariski's theorem on holomorphic functions
- Zariski–Riemann surface
- Zariski space
- Zariski's main theorem
Publications[link]
- Zariski, Oscar (2004) [1935], Abhyankar, Shreeram S.; Lipman, Joseph; Mumford, David, eds., Algebraic surfaces, Classics in mathematics (Second supplemented ed.), Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-540-58658-6, MR 0469915, http://books.google.com/books?id=d6Zzhm9eCmgC
- Zariski, Oscar (1958), Introduction to the problem of minimal models in the theory of algebraic surfaces, Publications of the Mathematical Society of Japan, 4, The Mathematical Society of Japan, Tokyo, MR 0097403, http://books.google.com/books?id=3-HuAAAAMAAJ
- Zariski, Oscar (1957 1969) [1958], Cohn, James, ed., An introduction to the theory of algebraic surfaces, Lecture notes in mathematics, 83, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, DOI:10.1007/BFb0082246, ISBN 978-3-540-04602-8, MR 0263819
- Zariski, Oscar; Samuel, Pierre (1975) [1958], Commutative algebra I, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 28, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-0-387-90089-6, MR 0090581
- Zariski, Oscar; Samuel, Pierre (1975) [1960], Commutative algebra. Vol. II, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-0-387-90171-8, MR0389876
- Zariski, Oscar (2006) [1973], Kmety, François; Merle, Michel; Lichtin, Ben, eds., The moduli problem for plane branches, University Lecture Series, 39, Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, ISBN 978-0-8218-2983-7, MR 0414561, http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0821829831
- Zariski, Oscar (1972), Collected papers. Vol. I: Foundations of algebraic geometry and resolution of singularities, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.-London, ISBN 978-0-262-08049-1, MR 0505100
- Zariski, Oscar (1973), Collected papers. Vol. II: Holomorphic functions and linear systems, Mathematicians of Our Time, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.-London, ISBN 978-0-262-01038-2, MR 0505100
- Zariski, Oscar (1978), Artin, Michael; Mazur, Barry, eds., Collected papers. Topology of curves and surfaces, and special topics in the theory of algebraic varieties, Mathematicians of Our Time, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.-London, ISBN 978-0-262-24021-5, MR 0505104
- Zariski, Oscar (1979), Lipman, Joseph; Teissier, B., eds., Collected papers. Vol. IV. Equisingularity on algebraic varieties, Mathematicians of Our Time, 16, MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-08049-1, MR 545653
References[link]
- Mumford, David (1986), "Oscar Zariski: 1899–1986", Notices of the American Mathematical Society 33 (6): 891–894, ISSN 0002-9920, MR860889
- Parikh, Carol (1991), The unreal life of Oscar Zariski, Boston, MA: Academic Press, ISBN 978-0-12-545030-0, MR1086628
External links[link]
- Oscar Zariski at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Oscar Zariski", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Zariski.html .
- Biography from United States Naval Academy.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Zariski, Oscar |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | American mathematician |
| Date of birth | April 24, 1899 |
| Place of birth | Kobrin, Imperial Russia |
| Date of death | July 4, 1986 |
| Place of death | Brookline, Massachusetts |
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Oscar Zariski (born Oscher Zaritsky April 24, 1899, in Kobrin, Russian Empire (today Belarus), died July 4, 1986, Brookline, Massachusetts) was a Russian mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.
Zariski was born Oscher (also transliterated as Ascher or Osher) Zaritsky to a Jewish family (his parents were Bezalel Zaritsky and Hanna Tennenbaum) and in 1918 studied at the University of Kiev. He left Kiev in 1920 to study in Rome where he became a disciple of the Italian school of algebraic geometry, studying with Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi.
Zariski wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1924 on a topic in Galois theory. At the time of his dissertation publication, he changed his name for professional purposes to Oscar Zariski.
Zariski emigrated to the United States in 1927 supported by Solomon Lefschetz. He had a position at Johns Hopkins University where he became professor in 1937. During this period, he wrote Algebraic Surfaces as a summation of the work of the Italian school. The book was published in 1935 and reissued 36 years later, with detailed notes by Zariski's students that illustrated how the field of algebraic geometry had changed. It is still an important reference.
