Nobel Prize

Otto Stern was born in Sorau, Upper Silesia, Germany, on February 17, 1888. In 1892 he moved with his parents to Breslau, where he attended high school. He began to study physical chemistry in 1906, receiving his Ph.D. degree from the University of Breslau in 1912. In the same year he joined Einstein at the…

Wolfgang Pauli was born on April 25th, 1900 in Vienna. He received his early education in Vienna before studying at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld. He obtained his doctor’s degree in 1921 and spent a year at the University of Göttingen as assistant to and a further year with at Copenhagen. The years…

Felix Bloch was born in Zurich, Switzerland, on October 23, 1905, as the son of Gustav Bloch and Agnes Bloch (née Mayer). From 1912 to 1918 he attended the public primary school and subsequently the “Gymnasium” of the Canton of Zurich, which he left in the fall of 1924 after having passed the “Matura”, i.e.…

Edward Mills Purcell was born in Taylorville, Illinois, U.S.A., on August 30, 1912. His parents, Edward A. Purcell and Mary Elizabeth Mills, were both natives of Illinois. He was educated in the public schools in Taylorville and in Mattoon, Illinois, and in 1929 entered Purdue University in Indiana. He graduated from Purdue in electrical engineering…

Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was born in Voronezh Region on July 28, 1904. His parents, Aleksei and Mariya Cerenkov, were peasants. He graduated from the Physico-Mathematical Faculty of Voronezh State University in 1928, and in 1930 he took a post as senior scientific officer in the P.N. Lebedev Institute of Physics in the U.S.S.R. Academy of…

Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was born in Vladivostok on July 8, 1895, as the son of Evgenij Tamm, an engineer, and Olga Davydova. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1918, specializing in physics, and immediately commenced an academic career in institutes of higher learning. He was progressively assistant, instructor, lecturer, and professor in charge of…

Julian Schwinger was born on 12th February 1918 in New York City. The principal direction of his life was fixed at an early age by an intense awareness of physics, and its study became an all-engrossing activity. To judge by a first publication, he debuted as a professional physicist at the age of sixteen. He…

Richard P. Feynman was born in New York City on the 11th May 1918. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained his B.Sc. in 1939 and at Princeton University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1942. He was Research Assistant at Princeton (1940-1941), Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University (1945-1950),…

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, May 23, 1908. He attended the University High School in Madison for several years, and graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he took extra work in mathematics and physics. After being…

Leon Cooper was born in 1930 in New York where he attended Columbia University (A.B. 1951; A.M. 1953; Ph.D. 1954). He became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1954-55) after which he was a research associate of Illinois (1955-57) and later an assistant professor at the Ohio State University (1957-58). Professor Cooper joined…