Marvin Leonard "Murph" Goldberger (October 22, 1922 – November 26, 2014) was an American theoretical physicist and former president of the California Institute of Technology.[1][2]
Marvin Leonard Goldberger | |
---|---|
4th President of the California Institute of Technology | |
In office 1978–1987 | |
Preceded by | Harold Brown |
Succeeded by | Thomas Eugene Everhart |
Personal details | |
Born | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. | October 22, 1922
Died | November 26, 2014 (aged 92) La Jolla, California, U.S. |
Spouse | Mildred Goldberger |
Other names | Murph |
Alma mater | |
Known for | Crossing symmetry |
Awards | Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics (1961) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Theoretical physics |
Institutions | |
Thesis | The interaction of high energy neutrons with heavy nuclei (1948) |
Doctoral advisor | Enrico Fermi |
Doctoral students | Fred Gilman Martin B. Einhorn (1968) |
Goldberger was born in Chicago, Illinois. He went on to receive his B.S. at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1948. His advisor on thesis, Interaction of High-Energy Neutrons with Heavy Nuclei, was Enrico Fermi.[3][4] While serving in the Army shortly after graduation, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project, where he worked under renowned physicist Enrico Fermi from 1943–45.[5]
Goldberger was a postdoc at MIT at least by 1951 where he shared a communal physics office with at least Murray Gell-Mann where they worked together on various projects and he encouraged him to join him at Chicago 1952 onwards,[6] before he became professor of physics at Princeton University from 1957 through 1977. He received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1961,[7] and in 1963 was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.[8] In 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[9] In 1980, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[10] From 1978 through 1987 he served as president of Caltech. He was the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1987 to 1991.[11] From 1991 to 1993 he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1993 until his death in November 2014, he served on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, first as a professor of physics and then as a professor emeritus. Goldberger also served as Dean of Natural Sciences for UC San Diego from 1994 to 1999.[2]
In 1954, he and Murray Gell-Mann introduced crossing symmetry.[12] In 1958, he and Sam Bard Treiman published the so-called Goldberger–Treiman relation.[13]
He was a participant in 1958's Project 137 and the first chairman of JASON. He was involved in nuclear arms control efforts. He also advised a number of major corporations; for example he was on the board of directors of General Motors for 12 years.[14]
Several of his doctoral students were elected Fellows of the American Physical Society: Allan N. Kaufman in 1962, Cyrus D. Cantrell in 1980, and Martin B. Einhorn in 1991.[15] Goldberger died in 2014 in La Jolla, California. His wife Mildred Goldberger, who also worked on the Manhattan Project, had previously died in 2006.[16][17] Upon his death he was survived by two sons and three grandchildren.[2]
He left Caltech to become director of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Princeton, N.J., think tank that had been home to such luminaries as Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Goldberger held that post from 1987 to 1991, when he moved to UCLA to teach physics. He spent his last years at UC San Diego, where he was dean of the school of natural sciences from 1994 to 1999.
Dr. Goldberger, a former president of the California Institute of Technology, is a wry man who is able, despite his revered office (it belonged to J. Robert Oppenheimer from 1947 to 1966), to poke fun at himself. Given such an independent and strong-willed faculty, he said he sees the director's job as more that of pit crew than of car driver in this intellectual road race.