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…

Prince Louis-Victor de Broglie of the French Academy, Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and Professor at the Faculty of Sciences at Paris University, was born at Dieppe (Seine Inférieure) on 15th August, 1892, the son of Victor, Duc de Broglie and Pauline d’Armaillé. After studying at the Lycée Janson of Sailly, he passed…

  Date of birth: 4 January 1940   Place of birth: Cardiff, Wales, U.K.     Education Cardiff High School   University of Cambridge, B.A. 1960 University of Cambridge, M.A., Ph.D 1964     Academic Career   Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1962 Research Assistant Professor, University of Illinois 1964-65 Assistant Director of Research, University…

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961. My parents were completing graduate degrees at Stanford. Two years later we moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city I consider to be my hometown. My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English. The family, including my younger…

I was born in White Plains, New York in 1930. I grew up in several different states and attended a variety of primary and secondary schools. Upon graduation from high school in 1948, I joined the U.S. Navy where I spent four years as an aerographer’s mate (weatherman), part of it during the Korean War.…

Werner Heisenberg was born on 5th December, 1901, at Würzburg. He was the son of Dr. August Heisenberg and his wife Annie Wecklein. His father later became Professor of the Middle and Modern Greek languages in the University of Munich. It was probably due to his influence that Heisenberg remarked, when the Japanese physicist Yukawa…

I was born on March 26, 1951 in the small town of Corvallis, Oregon. A number of years earlier my newly wed parents N. Orr and Alison Wieman, like somewhat belated pioneers, had driven their decrepit car across the country to settle deep in the forests of the Oregon coastal range. My father began working…