John Archibald Wheeler
He is the son of the mathematician and statistician Abraham Wald. Wald's parents died in a plane crash when he was three years old. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1968 and his PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1972, under the supervision of John Archibald Wheeler. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Nonspherical Gravitational Collapse and Black Hole Uniqueness".