Biography of julius robert oppenheimer

Much has been written about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. For another key period of his life, from —66, Oppenheimer served as the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, which is the longest tenure of any IAS Director thus far. Oppenheimer's legacy at the Institute is keenly felt today. His focus on intellectual freedom and interdisciplinarity of approach, highlighted by the active role that he took in bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to address important questions of the day, continues to be exemplified in IAS scholarship.

Was oppenheimer german

His father, Julius Oppenheimer, was a German immigrant who worked in his family's textile importing business. His mother, Ella Friedman, was a painter whose family had been in New York for generations. His younger brother, Frank, would also become a physicist. At Harvard, Oppenheimer studied mathematics and science, philosophy and Eastern religion, and French and English literature.

He was admitted to graduate standing in physics in his first year as an undergraduate on the basis of independent study.

How did oppenheimer die

During a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman, Higgins University Professor of Physics at Harvard, Oppenheimer was introduced to experimental physics, which quickly caught his attention. He graduated summa cum laude in and afterwards went to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory as research assistant to J. Oppenheimer met and studied with some of the day's most prominent figures, including Max Born and Niels Bohr.

In , Oppenheimer received his doctorate, and in the same year, he worked with Born on the structure of molecules, producing the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation. In , he received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. Accepting both, he divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley, attracting his own circle of brilliant young physics students.