Hofstadter was born into a Jewish family[4][5] in New York City on February 5, 1915, to Polish immigrants, Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and Henrietta,
née Koenigsberg.[6] 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 at the age of 23.[7] His doctoral dissertation was titled "Infra-red absorption by light and heavy formic and acetic acids."[8] He did his post-doctoral research at the
University of Pennsylvania and was an assistant professor at Princeton before joining
Stanford University. Hofstadter taught at Stanford from 1950 to 1985.[citation needed]
In 1942 he married Nancy Givan (1920–2007), a native of
Baltimore.[9] They had three children: Laura, Molly (who was disabled and not able to communicate),[10] and
Pulitzer Prize-winner
Douglas Hofstadter.[11]
Opus
Thallium-activated sodium iodide gamma ray detector
Coining of the fermi (unit) and 1961 Nobel Lecture
Robert Hofstadter coined the term
fermi, symbol fm,[14]
in honor of the Italian
physicistEnrico 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".[15] 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).[3]
Stanford University has an annual lecture series named after Hofstadter, the
Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lectures, which consists of two lectures each year, one oriented toward the general public and the other oriented toward scientists.
^
abR. W. McAllister & Robert Hofstadter, "Elastic Scattering of 188 MeV Electrons from Proton and the Alpha Particle," Physical Review, V102, p. 851 (1956).
^
abcRobert Hofstadter on Nobelprize.org including his Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1961 The Electron-Scattering Method and Its Application to the Structure of Nuclei and Nucleons
Robert Hofstadter on Nobelprize.org including his Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1961 The Electron-Scattering Method and Its Application to the Structure of Nuclei and Nucleons