Hofstadter, Robert

Hofstadter, Robert (1915–90) physicist; born in New York City. He performed research at Princeton (1939–40), then taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1940–41) and City College, N.Y. (1941–42). After working for the National Bureau of Standards (1942–43) and Norden Laboratories Corporation (1943–46), he returned to teaching at Princeton (1946–50), then Stanford (1950–80). He shared the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics for his pioneering research on the structure of protons and neutrons.

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Hofstadter, Robert 

Born Feb. 5, 1915, in New York. American physicist.

Hofstadter graduated from Princeton University in 1938. He then worked for the National Bureau of Standards and for the Norden Laboratory Corporation. Beginning in 1946, he was associated with Princeton University. In 1950 he began working at Stanford University, where he became a professor in 1954. In 1948, Hofstadter devised a scintillation counter that used sodium iodide activated by thallium as the scintillator and applied it to gamma spectroscopy. He then developed counters to register neutrons and X rays. He studied cosmic rays and the cascade showers generated by relativistic electrons.

Hofstadter was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1961 for his fundamental studies of electron scattering by nucleons.