Nobel Prize

I was born on April 6, 1949 in a regional hospital in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Having the umbilical cord wrapped twice tightly around my neck, my parents’ fear for the mental health of their first-born son subsided only gradually. My forefathers had been farmers, inn-keepers, blacksmiths, carpenters and shop keepers in the region.…

Nils Gustaf Dalén was born at Stenstorp in Skaraborg, Sweden on November 30, 1869, the son of a farmer. After his preliminary education, he entered a School of Agriculture to study dairy farming but he was later advised by Gustaf de Laval, who recognized his natural gift for mechanics, to seek a technical education. He…

I was born in Camberwell, South London, on the 26th of March, 1938. I am told I only made it into the world on the date in question by seven minutes, thereby exhibiting at this early stage the tendency to procrastination which I fear has characterized much of my subsequent career. Not a great deal…

I tend to partition my life into three compartments: childhood years in a remote village in the province of Henan in central China, schooling years in Hong Kong, and the years since I came to attend college in the United States. The only thread connecting them is the kindness, generosity and friendship from the people…

Percy Williams Bridgman was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 21st, 1882. He received his early education in public schools in the nearby city of Newton until 1900 when he entered Harvard University. He graduated A.B. in 1904, A.M. in 1905 and was awarded his Ph.D. (Physics) in 1908 when he joined the Faculty of…

P. G. de Gennes was born in Paris, France, in 1932. He majored from the École Normale in 1955. From 1955 to 1959, he was a research engineer at the Atomic Energy Center (Saclay), working mainly on neutron scattering and magnetism, with advice from A. Herpin, A. Abragam and J. Friedel (PhD 1957). During 1959…

I was born on September 27, 1918, the second of five children. My father John A. Ryle was a doctor who, after the war, was appointed to the first Chair of Social Medicine at Oxford University. I was educated at Bradfield College and Oxford, where I graduated in 1939. During the war years I worked…

I was born in Fowey, Cornwall, on 11 May 1924, the youngest of three sons and my father was a banker. I grew up in Newquay, on the Atlantic coast and there developed a love of the sea and boats. I was educated at King’s College, Taunton and went to the University of Cambridge in…

Johannes Stark was born on April 15, 1874 in Schickenhof, Bavaria; his father was a landed proprietor. He was educated at the Gymnasium (grammar school) in Bayreuth and later in Regensburg and proceeded to Munich University in 1894 to read physics, mathematics, chemistry and crystallography. Stark graduated in 1897 on the basis of his doctoral…

Emilio Segrè was born in Tivoli, Rome, on February 1st, 1905*, as the son of Giuseppe Segrè, industrialist, and Amelia Treves. He went to school in Tivoli and Rome, and entered the University of Rome as a student of engineering in 1922. In 1927 he changed over to physics and took his doctor’s degree in…