Nobel Prize

more

more

more

more

I was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 28, 1930, the second of two children of Selig and Lillian Friedman, nee Warsaw, who were immigrants from Russia. My father came to the United States in 1913 and later served in the U.S. Army Artillery Corps in World War I. After the war he was employed…

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on March 27, 1845, at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany, as the only child of a merchant in, and manufacturer of, cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam, a member of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam. When he was three years…

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was born at Arnhem, The Netherlands, on July 18, 1853, as the son of nursery-owner Gerrit Frederik Lorentz and his wife née Geertruida van Ginkel. When he was four years old, his mother died, and in 1862 his father married Luberta Hupkes. In those days the grade school did not only have…

Pieter Zeeman was born on May 25, 1865, at Zonnemaire, a small village in the isle of Schouwen, Zeeland, The Netherlands, as the son of the local clergyman Catharinus Forandinus Zeeman and his wife, née Wilhelmina Worst. After having finished his secondary school education at Zierikzee, the main town of the island, he went to…

Philipp von Lenard was born at Pozsony (Pressburg) in Austria-Hungary on June 7, 1862. His family had originally come from the Tyrol. He studied physics successively at Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Heidelberg under Bunsen, Helmholtz, Königsberger and Quincke and in 1886 took his Ph.D. at Heidelberg. From 1892 he worked as a Privatdozent and assistant…

Joseph John Thomson was born in Cheetham Hill, a suburb of Manchester on December 18, 1856. He enrolled at Owens College, Manchester, in 1870, and in 1876 entered Trinity College, Cambridge as a minor scholar. He became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1880, when he was Second Wrangler and Second Smith’s Prizeman, and he…