Robert Hofstadter, Professor of Physics at Stanford University, was born in New York, N.Y., of parents Louis Hofstadter and Henrietta Koenigsberg, on February 5, 1915. Hofstadter attended elementary and high schools in New York City, and was graduated in 1935 from the College of the City of New York with the B.S. degree, magna cum…

Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was born in Munich on the 31st of January 1929, the son of Ludwig Mössbauer and his wife Erna, née Ernst. He was educated at the “Oberschule” (non-classical secondary school) in Munich-Pasing and left after matriculating in I948. After working for one year in industrial laboratories, he started reading physics at the…

Guglielmo Marconi was born at Bologna, Italy, on April 25, 1874, the second son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian country gentleman, and Annie Jameson, daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in the County Wexford, Ireland. He was educated privately at Bologna, Florence and Leghorn. Even as a boy he took a keen interest in…

Max Born was born in Breslau on the 11th December, 1882, to Professor Gustav Born, anatomist and embryologist, and his wife Margarete, née Kauffmann, who was a member of a Silesian family of industrialists. Max attended the König Wilhelm’s Gymnasium in Breslau and continued his studies at the Universities of Breslau (where the well-known mathematician…

I was born in Nagoya, Japan on April 7, 1944. As it was in the middle of the Second World War, I was evacuated to Kawagoe Village in Mie Prefecture the following year to escape the aerial bombardment over Nagoya. Soon after the war ended, my father passed away. As I was only two years…

Karl Ferdinand Braun was born on June 6, 1850 at Fulda, where he was educated at the local “Gymnasium” (grammar school). He studied at the Universities of Marburg and Berlin and graduated in 1872 with a paper on the oscillations of elastic strings. He worked as assistant to Professor Quincke at Würzburg University and in…

Walther Bothe was born on January 8, 1891, at Oranienburg, near Berlin. From 1908 until 1912 he studied physics at the University of Berlin, where he was a pupil of , obtaining his doctorate just before the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war. From 1913 until 1930 he worked at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in the same…

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…

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 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…