Hofstadter was born in New York City on February 5, 1915, toPolish Jewish immigrants Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and Henrietta, née Koenigsberg.[4][5][6] He attended elementary and high schools in New York City and enteredCity College of New York, graduating with a B.S. degreemagna 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 theGeneral Electric Company, which enabled him to attend graduate school atPrinceton 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 theUniversity of Pennsylvania and was an assistant professor at Princeton before joiningStanford University. Hofstadter taught at Stanford from 1950 to 1985.[9]
Robert Hofstadter coined the termfermi, symbolfm,[15]in honor of the ItalianphysicistEnrico Fermi (1901–1954), one of the founders of nuclear physics, in Hofstadter's 1956 paper published in theReviews of Modern Physics journal, "Electron Scattering and Nuclear Structure".[16] The term is widely used by nuclear andparticle physicists. When Hofstadter was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics, it subsequently appeared 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, theRobert 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, 1961The Electron-Scattering Method and Its Application to the Structure of Nuclei and Nucleons
Robert Hofstadter on Nobelprize.org including his Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1961The Electron-Scattering Method and Its Application to the Structure of Nuclei and Nucleons
