Robert Hofstadter
Hofstadter, Robert (1915-1990), an American physicist, won the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics for his research concerning the nucleus (center) of the atom. He precisely measured the size and shape of the proton and the neutron, two particles within the nucleus, and he presented the first reasonably consistent picture of the structure of the nucleus. Hofstadter shared the prize with the German physicist Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer, who won for his separate research on gamma rays.
Hofstadter was born on Feb. 5, 1915, in New York City. In 1935, in New York City. In 1935, he earned a bachelor of science degree in physics from the City College (now City University) of New York. He received both master's and doctoral degrees from Princeton University in 1938.
From 1939 to 1941, Hofstadter conducted research and taught physics at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1942 to 1943, during World War II (1939–1945), he was a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). Hofstadter married Nancy Givan in 1942. They had three children. From 1943 to 1946, Hofstadter worked at Nordeen Laboratories in New York. He was an assistant professor of physics at Princeton from 1946 to 1950.
In 1950, Hofstadter went to Stanford University, where he did the research that won him the Nobel Prize. He rose from the rank of associate professor to full professor in 1954. From 1967 to 1974, he was director of the university's High Energy Physics Laboratory.
After retiring from Stanford in 1985, Hofstadter did research in coronary angiography, which explores heart functions using radioactive substances. He also helped design, build, and test a high-energy gamma-ray detector on an orbiting space telescope, which was launched in 1991. Hofstadter died of a heart attack on Nov. 17, 1990, in Stanford, California.