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…

I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. I spent the first six years of my life comfortably, as an adored child in a closely-knit middle-class family. Even when my family was rounded up for deportation to Poland it didn’t occur to me that anything could happen to us. All I remember is scrambling up…

My grandparents moved to Texas from the South after the U.S. Civil War and settled on small farms in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Both families emphasized education as the way to improve their children’s lives and both my parents managed to graduate from college. After receiving an M.A. in chemistry from Rice University, my father…

I was born on June 26, 1937 in Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. My parents, Lois Price Richardson and Robert Franklin Richardson, lived in Arlington, VA. My sister and only sibling, Addie Ann Richardson, was born on May 6, 1939, also in Georgetown University Hospital. My earliest memories are of the apartment building in…

Max Laue was born on October 9, 1879 at Pfaffendorf, near Koblenz. He was the son of Julius von Laue, an official in the German military administration, who was raised to hereditary nobility in 1913 and who was often sent to various towns, so that von Laue spent his youth in Brandenburg, Altona, Posen, Berlin…

Pjotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was born in Kronstadt, near Leningrad, on the 9th July 1894, son of Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa, military engineer, and Olga Ieronimovna née Stebnitskaia, working in high education and folklore research. Kapitsa began his scientific career in A.F. Ioffe’s section of the Electromechanics Department of the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, completing his studies in…

Chen Ning Yang was born on September 22, 1922, in Hofei, Anwhei, China, the first of five children of Ke Chuan Yang and Meng Hwa Loh Yang. He is also known as Frank or Franklin. Yang was brought up in the peaceful and academically inclined atmosphere of the campus of Tsinghua University, just outside of…

I was born August 27, 1915 in Washington, D.C. My mother, daughter of German immigrants, had been a mathematics instructor at the University of Kansas. My father, descended from Scottish refugees and a West Point graduate, was an officer in the Army Ordnance Corps. His frequently changing assignments took us from Washington, DC to Topeka,…

Antoine Henri Becquerel was born in Paris on December 15, 1852, a member of a distinguished family of scholars and scientists. His father, Alexander Edmond Becquerel, was a Professor of Applied Physics and had done research on solar radiation and on phosphorescence, while his grandfather, Antoine César, had been a Fellow of the Royal Society…

Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee was born in Shanghai, China, on November 24, 1926, the third of six children of Tsing-Kong Lee and Ming-Chang Chang. He received most of his high school education in Shanghai. During 1943-1944, he attended the National Chekiang University in Kweichow Province. In 1945, he attended the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming,…