Robert Hofstadter (February 5, 1915 – November 17, 1990) was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rudolf Mössbauer) "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons."
Biography
Hofstadter was born in New York City
on Feb. 5, 1915, to Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and the former
Henrietta Koenigsberg. He attended elementary and high schools in New
York City and entered City College of New York, graduating with a B.S. degree magna cum laude
in 1935 at the age of 20, and was awarded the Kenyon Prize in
Mathematics and Physics. He also received a Charles A. Coffin Foundation
Fellowship from the General Electric Company, which enabled him to attend graduate school at Princeton University, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1938. He did his post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania before joining Stanford University. Hofstadter taught at Stanford University from 1950 to 1985.
In 1942 he married Nancy Givan (1920-2007), a native of Baltimore. They had three children: Laura, Molly - who was disabled and not able to communicate, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter.
Robert Hofstadter's Erdős number is 5.
The character Leonard Hofstadter, featured in the CBS television comedy The Big Bang Theory, is named after Robert Hofstadter.
Coining of the fermi (unit) and 1961 Nobel Lecture
Robert Hofstadter coined the term fermi (unit), symbol fm, in honor of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), one of the founders of nuclear physics, in Hofstadter's 1956 paper published in the Reviews of Modern Physics journal, "Electron Scattering and Nuclear Structure". The term is widely used by nuclear and particle
physicists. When Hofstadter was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in
Physics, it subsequently appears in the text of his 1961 Nobel Lecture,
"The electron-scattering method and its application to the structure of
nuclei and nucleons" (December 11, 1961).
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and EGRET Telescope
In his last few years, Hofstadter became interested in astrophysics and applied his knowledge of scintillators to the design of the EGRET gamma-ray telescope of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory named for fellow Nobel Laureate in Physics (1927), Arthur Holly Compton. Stanford University's Department of Physics credits Hofstadter with being "one of the principal scientists who developed the Compton Observatory."