John Archibald Wheeler
Award Name : National Medal of Science
Year of Award : 1970
Award for : Physics
Location : Jacksonville, Florida, United States
John Archibald Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist. John Archibald Wheeler was born on the 9th of July, 1911 in Jacksonville, Florida. He was educated at Baltimore City College and Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, where he received a doctorate in 1933. He also studied with Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen. He and Bohr wrote “The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission” (1939), a seminal treatise that singled out uranium-235 for use in the development of an atomic bomb. Wheeler helped develop the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico (1949–51), and at Princeton he was director (1951–53) of Project Matterhorn, which was instituted to design thermonuclear weapons. For his work on nuclear fission and the technology of plutonium production, he was given the Fermi Award by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1968. From 1969 to 1976 he served as a member of the U.S. General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. In 1970 he was presented with the ‘National Medal of Science’ by the President of United States. He died on April 13, 2008 in Hightstown, New Jersey, United States.