The American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) made fundamental contributions to theoretical physics and was director of the atomic energy research project at Los Alamos, N.Mex.

On April 22, 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose father was a German immigrant and wealthy textile importer, was born in New York City. After attending the Ethical Culture School in New York, where his lifelong devotion to literature, the arts, and science was nurtured, he entered Harvard University in 1922 and completed his bachelor's degree in 3 years. He required only 2 additional years of study at Cambridge University and the University of Göttingen to complete his doctoral degree in 1927.

Following 2 years of postdoctoral study at home and abroad on fellowships, Oppenheimer became associate professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Almost immediately, however, he began spending part of each academic year at the University of California at Berkeley, and...