Robert Hofstadter

Robert Hofstadter married Nancy Givan in 1942. The couple had three children. His son, Douglas, is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

He died of a heart attack on November 17, 1990, in Stanford, California, at the age of 75.

Robert Hofstadter was born on February 5, 1915, in New York to Polish immigrants, Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and his wife, Henrietta Koenigsberg. His family was Jewish.

After attending elementary and high schools in New York City, he enrolled at the City College of New York, graduating with a B.S. degree magna cum laude in 1935. An excellent student, he became the recipient of the Kenyon Prize in Mathematics and Physics.

He was also awarded the Coffin Fellowship by the General Electric Company which enabled him to attend graduate school at Princeton University where he studied physics. He received both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1938 from that institution.

Upon completing his doctorate degree by the age of 23, he was awarded a Procter Fellowship at Princeton University for postdoctoral work in 1938-39. During this time he began the study of photoconductivity in willemite crystals which laid the foundation for his future works.

In 1939, he received the Harrison Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania where he continued his postdoctoral work. There he met L. I. Schiff who became his friend for many years. It was at Pennsylvania that he helped to construct a large Van de Graaff machine for nuclear research.

During the World War II he served as a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards. There he was pivotal in developing the proximity fuse, an anti-aircraft weapon used to detonate anti-aircraft and other artillery shells. He also worked at the Norden Laboratory Corporation during the war years.

He embarked on an academic career once the war ended. He joined the faculty of Princeton in 1946 where he primarily dealt with the study of infrared rays, photoconductivity, and crystal and scintillation counters. He filed a patent for thallium-activated sodium iodide gamma ray detector in 1948.

In 1950, he left Princeton to join the Stanford University as Associate Professor of Physics. There he initiated research on electron-scattering and continued working on scintillation counters and developed new detectors for neutrons and X-rays.

From 1953 onwards, he focused mainly on electron-scattering measurements. Working together with his students and colleagues, he studied the charge distribution in atomic nuclei and made the use of the linear electron accelerator to measure and explore the constituents of atomic nuclei.

In 1956, he published a paper ‘Electron Scattering and Nuclear Structure’ in ‘Reviews of Modern Physics’ journal in which he coined the term “Fermi”, symbol “fm” in honor of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, one of the founders of nuclear physics. The term is widely used by nuclear and particle physicists.

Robert Hofstadter is best remembered for his research in electron scattering in atomic nuclei. He not only discovered that protons and neutrons—the fundamental constituents of the nuclei of atoms—have a definite size and form, but also determined that precise size of the proton and neutron. He also provided the first "reasonably consistent" picture of the structure of the atomic nucleus.