Nobel Prize

The most deeply formative events of my scientific career long preceded my first contact with the research community; indeed, some of them preceded my birth. My grandparents emigrated from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, as young teenagers; on my father’s side they came from Poland and on my mother’s side from Italy,…

I was born on 22 March 1931 in New York, the elder child of Abraham and Fanny Richter. In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me. The most influential teachers in my undergraduate years…

Apart from several monographs on physics and astrophysics, I have published two books which are collections of various articles of scientific, semi-scientific and general, social and political character. Some of these articles contain rather much biographical material. So I do not have any wish to come back to my autobiography. However, it is the wish…

Murray Gell-Mann was born on 15th September 1929, in New York City. He obtained his B.Sc. at Yale University in 1948, and his Ph.D. in 1951 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1952 he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, during 1952-1953 he was instructor at the University of Chicago, from…

Harold Pinter did not submit an autobiography.

I was born in Berne, a northeast Indiana farming community proud of its Swiss heritage. Life was not easy for my parents, Noah J. Schrock, the second of six children, and Martha A. Habegger, the second of ten children. They married in 1933 during the Depression. My oldest brother, Luther, was born in 1934, Theodore…

I was born in Heidelberg, Germany, on October 30, 1941. My parents had moved there from their native Breslau a few years earlier. As far as I can tell, I am the only academic in our family. My father Karl Hänsch was a businessman engaged in the export of farming machinery, while my mother Marta…

I was born the youngest of three children, on a cattle ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska, not far from the South Dakota border, on March 10, 1923. This is a very sparsely populated part of the United States and remote from any center of population. It seems incredible by modern standards that by the age…

I was born in July 1947 in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, the city which remains my home today. My childhood holidays were, however, spent in the Auvergne countryside in central France, where I was content to spend my days outdoors, observing the wonders of the natural living world. Even the smallest of insects could…

I was born on August 18, 1932 in Chabris, a “bourg”, larger than a village but smaller than a town, located in Berry south of the Loire Valley. This was – and still is – a region of agriculture with some renowned products such as welsh rabbit, goat cheeses and white asparagus. It was the…