J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904. His father was a German immigrant who had made his money by importing textiles, and his mother was an American-born painter who had studied in Paris. He liked math and science, but he also studied Greek, Latin, French, and German. He graduated in 1921. His early education was at the Ethical Culture School in New York. Oppenheimer attended Harvard University for his undergraduate studies. Besides doing very well in physics and chemistry, he continued to study different languages in hope that it would benefit him one day. He got his PhD in Germany after graduating from Harvard in 1925. In 1929 he came back to the United States and his positions at Berkeley and Cal Tech. He was an extraordinary teacher. His many later finds, such as the neutron, positron, meson, greatly benefitted the United States in other studies. The rise of fascism in the 1930s made him step away from his studies and take a strong stand against it. By 1939, the United states got news that Germans had split the atom. The thought that the Nazis could develop extremely powerful weapons made President Roosevelt establish the Manhattan Project in 1941. In June 1942, he took the position of director of the project. Research was being done at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but Oppenheimer set up another research station at Los
Alamos, New Mexico. There he brought the best people in physics to work on the problem of
