Joseph

Joseph O. Hirschfelder

#29,853
Most Influential Person Across History

American physicist

Joseph O. Hirschfelder's Academic­Influence.com Rankings

Joseph O. Hirschfelder
Chemistry
#742
Historical Rank
chemistry Degrees
Joseph O. Hirschfelder
Physics
#3017
Historical Rank
physics Degrees
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  • Chemistry
  • Physics

Why Is Joseph O. Hirschfelder Influential?

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According to Wikipedia, Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and in the creation of the nuclear bomb. Biography Hirschfelder was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a Jewish couple, Arthur Douglas and May Rosalie . He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1929 and at Yale University from 1929 to 1931. Hirschfelder received doctorates in physics and chemistry from Princeton University under the direction of Eugene Wigner, Henry Eyring and Hugh Stott Taylor. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with John von Neumann for a year after his PhD at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1937, he moved to University of Wisconsin and stayed there until retirement in 1981, except during World War II. Robert Oppenheimer assembled a team at the Los Alamos Laboratory to work on plutonium gun design Thin Man, that included senior engineer Edwin McMillan and senior physicists Charles Critchfield and Joseph Hirschfelder. Hirschfelder had been working on internal ballistics. Oppenheimer led the design effort himself until June 1943, when Navy Captain William Sterling Parsons arrived took over the Ordnance and Engineering Division and direct management of the "Thin Man" project. Hirschfelder was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a group leader in theoretical physics and ordnance at the Los Alamos Atomic Bomb Laboratory, chief phenomenologist at the nuclear bomb tests at Bikini, the founder of the Theoretical Chemistry Institute and the Homer Adkins professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin.

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