Libby, Willard

Libby, Willard (Frank)

(born Dec. 17, 1908, Grand Valley, Colo., U.S.—died Sept. 8, 1980, Los Angeles, Calif.) U.S. chemist. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley and later taught there and at the University of Chicago and UCLA. With the Manhattan Project, he helped develop a method for separating uranium isotopes and showed that tritium is a product of cosmic radiation. In 1947 he and his students developed carbon-14 dating, which proved to be an extremely valuable tool for archaeology, anthropology, and earth science and earned him a 1960 Nobel Prize.

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Libby, Willard (Frank) (1908–80) chemist; born in Grand Valley, Colo. He studied at the University of California: Berkeley and was teaching there when World War II took him to Columbia University to work on the atom bomb; he then taught at the University of Chicago (1945–54) before joining the faculty of the University of California: Los Angeles (1959–76). He served on the Atomic Energy Commission (1954–59). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1960) for his role in developing (beginning in 1939 at Berkeley) the carbon-14 method of determining the age of ancient objects crucial to archaeology.