Nobel Prize

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born on November 23, 1837 in Leyden, The Netherlands, the son of Jacobus van der Waals and Elisabeth van den Burg. After having finished elementary education at his birthplace he became a schoolteacher. Although he had no knowledge of classical languages, and thus was not allowed to take academic…

I was born in 1940 as the second child in a family living in Nagoya, a city with a population of around a million inhabitants. My older sister died of tuberculosis before entering elementary school and so I was an only child until my second sister, who is seven years younger than me, was born…

Polykarp Kusch was born in Blankenburg, Germany, on the 26th January, 1911, the son of a clergyman. He has lived in the United States since 1912 and is a citizen of that country. He received his early education in the midwest of the United States. His original professional goal was in the field of chemistry,…

J. Hans D. Jensen was born in Hamburg on 25th June 1907, the son of a gardener Karl Jensen. From 1926 he studied physics, mathematics, physical chemistry and philosophy at the Universities of Hamburg and Freiburg i. Br. He obtained his Ph.D in 1932 in Hamburg (physics, Dr.rer.nat.). He became scientific assistant at the Institute…

Leo Esaki was born in Osaka, Japan in 1925. Esaki completed work for a B.S. in Physics in 1947 and received his Ph.D in 1959, both from the University of Tokyo. Esaki is an IBM Fellow and has been engaged in semiconductor research at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York,…

Ivar Giaever was born in Bergen, Norway, April 5, 1929, the second of three children. He grew up in Toten where his father, John A. Giaever, was a pharmacist. He attended elementary school in Toten but received his secondary education in the city of Hamar. Next he worked one year at the Raufoss Munition Factories…

Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov was born on December, 14, 1922 in the small town of Usman near Voronezh, the son of Gennady Fedorovich Basov and Zinaida Andreevna Molchanova. His father was a professor of the Voronezh Forest Institute and devoted his life to investigation of the influence of forest belts on underground waters and on surface…

Nevill Francis Mott was born in Leeds, U.K., on September 30th, 1905. His parents, Charles Francis Mott and Lilian Mary (née) Reynolds, met when working under in the Cavendish Laboratory; his great grandfather was Sir John Richardson, the arctic explorer. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol and St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied…

I was born on August 19, 1924 in Amherst, Nova Scotia and raised in the village of Wallace until I was about two years old. At this time, my family moved to Chaudiere, a small logging community in northern Quebec. My father was the local physician in the community and my mother took on the…

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov was born on July 11th, 1916, in Australia. After the Great October Revolution he went in 1923 with his parents to the Soviet Union. In 1934 Alexander Prochorov entered the Physics Department of the Leningrad State University. He attended lectures of Prof. V.A. Fock (quantum mechanics, theory of relativity), Prof. S.E. Frish…