death_date nationality birth_date signature residence alma_mater death_place birth_name spouse doctoral_students image birth_place field known_for doctoral_advisor work_institution notable_students article_title prizes
6 march 2005 german american 2 july 1906 hans bethe -lrb- signature -rrb- . jpg united states university of frankfurt university of munich ithaca , new york , united states hans albrecht bethe rose two children -rrb- peter ghatak jeffrey goldstone john irwin roman jackiw robert eugene marshak a. john negele r. rajaraman roderick v. reid m. k. sundaresan carruthers david j. thouless benjamin day p. s. epstein ajoy hans bethe.jpg strasbourg , germany nuclear physics white-space electrodynamics bethe -- salpeter equation bethe-slater curve bethe formula bethe : -- feynman formula bethe lattice bethe ansatz bethe -- weizsäcker nowrap formula bethe -- weizsäcker process ; nuclear physics stellar nucleosynthesis quantum arnold sommerfeld university of manchester of tübingen cornell university university of bristol university freeman dyson hans bethe
 white-space medal eddington medal enrico fermi award rumford prize nobel prize : in physics nat'l medal of science lomonosov gold medal oersted nowrap medal bruce medal benjamin franklin medal ; henry draper medal formemrs franklin
hans bethe

hans albrecht bethe -lrb- ; july 2 , 1906 -- march 6 , 2005 -rrb- was a german and american nuclear physicist who , in addition to making important contributions to astrophysics , quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics , won the 1967 nobel prize in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis .
for most of his career , bethe was a professor at cornell university .
during world war ii , he was head of the theoretical division at the secret los alamos laboratory which developed the first atomic bombs .
there he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons and developing the theory behind the implosion method used in both the trinity test and the `` fat man '' weapon dropped on nagasaki in august 1945 .
after the war , bethe also played an important role in the development of the hydrogen bomb , though he had originally joined the project with the hope of proving it could not be made .
bethe later campaigned with albert einstein and the emergency committee of atomic scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race .
he helped persuade the kennedy and nixon administrations to sign , respectively , the 1963 partial nuclear test ban treaty and 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty -lrb- salt i -rrb- .
his scientific research never ceased and he was publishing papers well into his nineties , making him one of the few scientists to have published at least one major paper in his field during every decade of his careerwhich , in bethe 's case , spanned nearly seventy years .
freeman dyson , once one of his students , called him the `` supreme problem-solver of the 20th century '' .
