Rittner D. A to Z of Scientists in Weather and Climate

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The global-scale air motion driven by the gyro-

scopic pumping action upward in the tropics,

poleward, and then downward in high latitudes is

known to atmospheric scientists as the Brewer-

Dobson circulation. Journey through the strato-

sphere takes several years and exposes the air, the

chlorofluorocarbons, and all the other chemicals

to hard, solar, ultraviolet radiation along the way.

Solar ultraviolet photons high up in the strato-

sphere are energetic enough to break up even the

tightly bound chlorofluorocarbon molecules,

prompting a complicated sequence of chemical

reactions, some of them forming ozone and oth-

ers destroying it. The conditions most strongly

favoring ozone destruction are found in the

Antarctic polar stratosphere in springtime, essen-

tially because those reactions are favored by the

extreme cold, but significant ozone destruction

has been observed in the Arctic polar strato-

sphere as well in recent years because global tem-

perature trends are making the Arctic winter

stratosphere both colder on average and colder

more often, even though less cold than the

Antarctic. (The global warming of the lower

atmosphere tends to be accompanied by global

cooling of the stratosphere.)

McIntyre’s work has contributed to the

sophisticated mathematical theories used to

understand the fluid dynamics involved in all

this to describe more precisely the way in which

ozone, chlorofluorocarbons, and other chemicals

are pumped around in the stratosphere. The

mathematical theories go under such technical

names as wave–mean interaction, downward con-

trol principle, and potential-vorticity inversion. For

instance, McIntyre’s downward control princi-

ple, developed in collaboration with Professor

Peter Haynes and others, observes that the

pumping action tends to reach mainly down-

ward. More precisely

, air pushed westward on a

global scale, pumps a global-scale circulation

that tends to burrow downward from the altitude

of pushing.

Such understanding enables scientists to dis-

cern more clearly how the different parts of the

atmosphere are linked together: to tell what

affects what and how strongly it does so. It also

helps with the ongoing effort to improve super-

computer simulations of the atmosphere and

other parts of the Earth’s life-support system, such

as the oceans, the biosphere (the part of the Earth

and its atmosphere in which living organisms

exist or that is capable of supporting life), and the

cryosphere (the portion of the Earth where water

is perennially or seasonally frozen as sea ice, snow

cover, permafrost, ice sheets, and glaciers). This

114 McIntyre, Michael Edgeworth

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre. McIntyre’s research has

helped to explain why the strongest humanmade ozone

depletion occurs in the Southern Hemisphere in the

form of the so-called Antarctic ozone hole. (Courtesy

of Michael Edgeworth McIntyre)

understanding improves scientists’ ability to eval-

uate the accuracy of computer models; for

instance, the downward-control principle made

scientists aware that special attention has to be

paid to the top boundary of the models, previ-

ously considered unimportant.

McIntyre’s research interests extend also to

other parts of the atmosphere, to the oceans, and

to the Sun’s interior, where the fluid dynamics are

in many ways fundamentally similar. His latest

work has led to a breakthrough in understanding

how the Sun’s differential rotation works. Gyro-

scopic pumping is again involved, but it is driven

this time by the chaotic, turbulent motion in the

Sun’s outer convection zone and burrowing

downward into the region beneath. He has pub-

lished three papers on this, one of them in col-

laboration with Professor Douglas Gough, who is

best known for his contributions to probing the

Sun’s interior using sound waves.

McIntyre was elected as a Fellow of the

Royal Society (1990), of the American Meteoro-

logical Society (1990), and of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science

(1999). In 1987, he was awarded the Carl-Gustaf

Rossby Research Medal, the highest award of the

American Meteorological Society, for his work

on the fluid dynamics of the stratosphere.

He was a SERC/Engineering and Physical

Sciences Research Council senior research fellow

from 1992 to 1997, and in 1999, he was awarded

the Julius Bartels Medal of the European Geo-

physical Society. He has published more than 110

scientific papers in a variety of journals. Married

to Ruth Hecht and assisting in raising her three

children by a previous marriage, McIntyre is cur-

rently a professor at the Centre for Atmospheric

Science at the Department of Applied Mathe-

matics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge. He

is using his knowledge of music to analyze the

“lucidity principles” employed by the best writers

and communicators and is writing a book called

Lucidity, Science, and Music or The T

wo Sides of the

Platonic.

5 Milankovitch, Milutin

(1879–1958)

Serbian

Astrophysicist, Engineer

Milutin Milankovitch was born in the rural vil-

lage of Dalj, Serbia (then Austria-Hungary), on

May 28, 1879. He attended the V

ienna Institute

of Technology and graduated with a doctorate in

technical sciences in 1904. He accepted a faculty

position in applied mathematics at the Univer-

sity of Belgrade in 1909 shortly after a short stay

as an engineer for a construction company, where

he built dams, bridges, and other structures. He

stayed at the university his entire life.

In 1938, Milankovitch developed one of the

prevailing theories relating to Earth motions and

long-term climate change. His mathematical the-

ory of climate, based on the seasonal and latitu-

dinal variations of solar radiation (insolation)

received by the Earth, was based on previous the-

ories by A. J. Adhemar (1842) and James

CROLL

(1875). Known as the Milankovitch theory, it

states that as the Earth travels through space

around the Sun, cyclical variations in the shape

of the orbit as it goes around the Sun (orbital

eccentricity), changes in the angle that the

Earth’s axis makes with the plane of the Earth’s

orbit (obliquity), and precession (the change in

the direction of the Earth’s axis of rotation) all

produce variations in the amount of solar energy

that reach the planet and therefore cause the

advance and retreat of the polar ice caps and

cause glaciation. These orbital motions are

known variously as the Milankovitch cycles and

the Croll–Milankovitch cycles.

Milankovitch’s theory was abandoned when

the advent of radiocarbon dating appeared to

show that Milankovitch’s detailed calculations

were in conflict with the timing of the ice ages.

It was not until 1976 when a study that examined

deep-sea sediment cores using Radiometric (K-

Ar) and paleomagnetic dating found Milan-

kovich’s theory did indeed corresponded to

Milankovitch, Milutin 115

periods of climate change. Unfortunately, he did

not live long enough to see his work accepted. He

died on December 12, 1958, in Belgrade.

5 Minnis, Patrick

(1950– )

American

Meteorologist

Patrick Minnis was born on October 15, 1950, in

Shawnee, Oklahoma, and grew up in Oklahoma

City

. He is the son of Robert Edward Minnis, Jr.,

a petroleum geologist, and Kathleen Keefe John-

son, a former social worker. As a youngster, Min-

nis played many sports (football, basketball,

baseball, and track) and enjoyed the outdoors.

Like most youngsters, he had a variety of short-

lived interests, although when he was nine years

old, he spent much of the year making weather

observations. He also remembers spending many

spring evenings in his basement watching the

weather reporter on TV while the city was under

a tornado watch. Minnis attended Rosary School,

a parochial school in Oklahoma City, through

eighth grade, and with a scholarship attended

and graduated from Casady School, a prep school

in Oklahoma City. Like most youths, he worked

odd jobs from gas-station operator at age 14 to

telephone sales.

Minnis attended Vanderbilt University in

Nashville, Tennessee, and received his bachelor’s

degree in materials science and metallurgical

engineering in 1972. In 1973, he married Debo-

rah K. Mohrman Minnis, whom he met while at

Vanderbilt. They have four daughters.

After graduating from Vanderbilt, Minnis

began to test products for Ferro Fiberglass in

Nashville and after nine months was promoted to

quality-control supervisor. A year later, he was

placed on the road as a fiberglass salesman. His

road job changed his life. As he drove through-

out the southeastern United States, he spent

many hours watching the sky through his wind-

shield. After he narrowly missed a tornado in

Nashville, Tennessee, one evening and another

one in Louisville, Tennessee, the next evening

during the great tornado outbreak of 1974 (April

3–4), his childhood interest in weather was

reawakened. He returned to school the following

year in a new field, atmospheric science. He went

on to graduate school at Colorado State Univer-

sity in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he received

an M.S. in atmospheric science in 1978; he was

awarded his Ph.D. in meteorology at the Univer-

sity of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1991.

With the guidance of his advisor Stephen

Cox, he used his earlier experience with X rays in

materials science to study atmospheric radiation.

He had analyzed potsherds from Indian ruins and

clay samples from clay sources in Mexico for an

archaeologist who was trying to study trade pat-

terns in pre-Columbian times.

Minnis wrote his first publication in 1976; it

appeared as a 1976 Colorado State University

technical report and reduced the number of cal-

culations needed to compute the absorption of

infrared radiation by water vapor in the atmo-

sphere to facilitate the computation of radiative

heating rates in a detailed radiative transfer

model. His first journal publication (coauthored)

in 1983 in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets

reported the results of a study estimating the

errors in the Earth’

s radiation budget (balance

between incoming energy from the Sun and out-

going thermal [longwave] and reflected [short-

wave] energy from the Earth) that would result

from using various combinations of satellites. It

was the first analysis to examine the diurnal vari-

ation of clouds and how they would affect the

albedo (the fraction of light that is reflected by a

body or surface) of the Earth at different times of

day. Minnis spent many hours estimating the

amount of clouds from satellite photographs and

then used the data in a radiative transfer model

to simulate what various satellites would measure.

Minnis has made several important contri-

butions in meteorology. He published a three-part

article in 1984 that discovered, among other

things, the existence of clouds that systematically

116 Minnis, Patrick

changed and reformed at relatively predictable

times of day over very large areas. His study was

the first to use an automated computer algorithm

to analyze geostationary satellite data on a large

scale. Minnis also developed an empirical model

of ocean reflectance patterns that is still being

used for satellite analysis. Ocean reflectance con-

tains all the essential information containing the

qualitative and quantitative properties of seawa-

ter constituents.

His model was the first to objectively quan-

tify the diurnal variations of clouds from infrared

and visible satellite imagery and the first to mea-

sure the diurnal cycle of reflected and emitted

radiation over a significant portion of the Earth.

Minnis’s first discovery was important for

many reasons. It demonstrated that geostationary

digital data could be used scientifically and sys-

tematically to study clouds and their optical prop-

erties and to estimate the radiation balance.

Clouds have a significant effect on the Earth’s

radiation balance. High, thin cirrus clouds help

warm Earth’s surface by allowing sunlight to pass

through but then trapping heat emitted by the

surface. Low, thick cumulus clouds help cool the

surface by reflecting incoming sunlight back into

space. Prior to that, the satellite images were

merely used to study clouds in a qualitative man-

ner or in a very limited scientific manner. The

study demonstrated that in addition to surface

temperature, the diurnal cycle of clouds should be

included in climate models and in remote sens-

ing of the Earth. It also helped pioneer the devel-

opment of multispectral techniques for cloud

remote sensing. Remote sensing is the science of

acquiring information about the Earth’s surface

without actually being in contact with it. This is

done by sensing and recording reflected or emit-

ted energy and processing, analyzing, and apply-

ing that information.

In 1993, Minnis determined the impact of

the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption on the Earth’s

radiation balance and demonstrated that it

should cause significant cooling of the Earth. His

studies of the Mount Pinatubo event quantified,

for the first time, the actual changes in the Earth’s

radiation budget resulting from a volcanic erup-

tion. The results, based on satellite data together

with other measurements of aerosol loading, were

used to model the impact of the eruption on the

global surface temperature, leading in turn to

accurate determination of the climate impact.

The modeling study shows that measurements of

radiative changes resulting from volcanic erup-

tions can be used to predict accurately the

changes in the Earth’s surface temperature during

the following year or two.

Minnis also found in 1993 that for purposes

of computing the radiation budget of the Earth

and for remote sensing of clouds, it was essential

that ice clouds should be modeled, using the opti-

cal properties of ice crystals rather than ice

spheres. Prior to this study, models assumed that

cirrus clouds were composed of ice spheres. In this

research, Minnis used the latest theoretical mod-

els of ice-crystal optical properties to construct

the framework for simulating and remotely sens-

ing cloud properties, using more-realistic hexag-

onal ice columns. Satellite data using the new

models in place of the old spherical particle mod-

els showed dramatic differences in the cloud opti-

cal depth and height. The new quantities were

much more accurate, as determined from aircraft

and LIDAR data. LIDAR is an airborne laser sys-

tem, flown aboard rotary or fixed-wing aircraft,

that is used to acquire x, y, and z coordinates of

terrain and terrain featur

es that are both human-

made and naturally occurring. In atmospheric sci-

ence, LIDARS are used to profile cloud and

aerosol layers as well as to determine humidity

profiles in the atmosphere. Minnis’s study opened

the door for more accurate analyses of satellite

data and computations of the radiation budget in

cloudy atmospheres. Today, the spherical ice

droplet is no longer used to represent ice in clouds

in most applications.

In 1998, Minnis discovered the widespread

effects of contrails, the streaks of condensed water

vapor that airplanes and rockets make in the air.

According to Minnis, they can spread into cirrus

Minnis, Patrick 117

clouds that cover large areas and are responsible

for an increase in cirrus cloudiness over the

United States since the beginning of the jet age.

This discovery shows that jet air traffic can

have a much larger impact on climate than

expected for linear contrails. Minnis demon-

strated that contrail-generated clouds can last

much longer and can cover up to four times the

area predicted by an analysis that assumes that

contrails remain linear and narrow. Because of

this effect, according to the Minnis study, cirrus

cloud cover should be increasing over areas with

heavy jet traffic. Initial analyses of cloud obser-

vations support this prediction, indicating that

cirrus coverage has been increasing over the

United States since 1970 despite fluctuations in

humidity. Research continues to determine

whether contrail-generated cirrus will become a

major climate change factor in the future as air

traffic continues to increase.

Minnis has been recognized for his pioneering

work. In 1985, he received the H.J.E. Reid Award

for Most Outstanding Paper at NASA Langley

Research Center for “Diurnal variability of

regional cloud and clear-sky radiative parameters

derived from GOES data.” In 1993, he was

awarded the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scien-

tific Achievement for outstanding contributions

advancing the understanding of clouds and their

effect on the Earth’s radiation budget and climate.

Two years later, NASA again recognized him with

the Langley Exceptional Publication Award for

“Inference of cirrus cloud properties using satellite-

observed visible and infrared radiances.” In 1998,

the American Meteorological Society honored

him with its Henry G. Houghton Award in phys-

ical meteorology for outstanding contributions to

understanding the effects of clouds and aerosols on

the Earth’s radiation budget.

Minnis has published more than 100 papers

and presented more than 200 presentations and

papers in his career, but more important, he has

been instrumental in expanding the scientific

study of clouds using geostationary satellite data.

5 Mintz, Yale

(1916–1991)

American

Meteorologist

Yale Mintz is widely known as a pioneering sci-

entist in atmospheric numerical mo

deling. He

attended Dartmouth College and received his

B.A. in general humanistic studies in 1937; then

in graduate school, he earned an M.S. in geology

from Columbia University in 1942 and a Ph.D.

in meteorology in 1949 from UCLA, only the

second to receive such a degree at that school. He

stayed at UCLA to begin his career, working with

Jacob

BJERKNES

, who had founded the UCLA

meteorology department only eight years earlier.

Mintz worked as his assistant on the UCLA Gen-

eral Circulation Project of the Atmosphere and

later became the chair of the department of mete-

orology (1967–69). In the mid-1950s, the

weather models used by forecasters were still

regional or continental (vs. hemispherical or

global) in scale, but Mintz and other theoretical

meteorologists—unconcerned with real-time

forecasting—found general circulation modeling

a promising research tool.

Mintz recruited a Japanese mathematician,

Akio Arakawa, to help him build general circu-

lation models, and together they constructed a

series of increasingly sophisticated models start-

ing in 1961. The first UCLA general circulation

model, now known as the Mintz-Arakawa Model,

was a global one and was the first of its kind ever

developed. The creating of models at UCLA had

the most influence in the field, focusing on model

development and letting other organizations con-

duct the experimental studies to test them. Their

models, or evolutions of them, are still being used

throughout the world for weather and climate

predictions, as well as for scientific studies focus-

ing on the global atmosphere.

In 1977, he retired from UCLA and joined

the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, where

as a consulting scientist he continued his research

118 Mintz, Yale

with efforts on understanding land-surface pro-

cesses that fashion land-surface habitats and

determine their biological productivity and

response to human or natural environmental

changes and the hydrological cycle. The hydro-

logical cycle describes the circulation of water

around the Earth, from ocean to atmosphere to

the Earth’s surface and back to the ocean. Mintz

recruited young Englishman and biometeorolo-

gist Piers

SELLERS

to work for him in computer

modeling of climate systems. Sellers went on to

become an American astronaut.

Mintz was the author of many pioneering

articles that became standard references on large-

scale atmospheric and oceanic general-circula-

tion models that led to significant understanding

of climate processes. He coauthored several clas-

sic papers on the effect of the winds and tides on

the variation of the length of the day and on the

numerical simulation of stratospheric ozone. A

major issue affecting the stratosphere is the deple-

tion of the ozone layer, which leads to the for-

mation of the “ozone hole” over the Antarctic in

southern spring. His research has become stan-

dard reference material in textbooks.

He received the Clarence Leroy Meisinger

Award from the American Meteorological Soci-

ety in 1967, the NASA Award for distinguished

service in 1988, and the Carl-Gustaf Rossby

Research Medal from the American Meteorolog-

ical Society in 1990. He died of cancer while in

Israel on April 27, 1991.

5 Mitseva-Nikolova, Rumyana Petrova

(1948– )

Bulgarian

Physicist

Rumyana Mitseva was born on October 30, 1948,

in Dolna Banya, a small village in Bulgaria, to

Peter Ivanov Mitzev

, a teacher and researcher in

geodesy and cartography, and Elissaveta Kostadi-

nova Mitzeva, an accountant. As a youngster

attending school in Sofia, Mitseva was interested

in literature, theater, films, dance, and pan-

tomime. While in school and as a student, she

performed in nonprofessional theatre, took a part

in a nonprofessional pantomime group, and com-

peted in a dance club for competition (Latin and

classic) dances. She attended the University of

Sofia and received her B.S. in physics, specializ-

ing in solid state physics, in 1971 and, in 1975,

an M.S. in meteorology. She married Peter Ste-

fanov Nikolov in 1975, and they have one

daughter. She received a Ph.D. in physics in

1987. At that point, she began her career as a

physicist in the laboratory of semiconductors in

the Institute of Physics in Sofia (As a rule in the

eastern countries at the time, young people did

not work after earning a degree if they continued

to study in the university).

In 1978, she published her first scientific

paper in Russian in the Bulgarian Geophysical

Journal, entitled “Simulation of real powerful

convective clouds and precipitation by a mo

del

of an isolated thermal” with her colleague Vassil

Andreev; this paper checked the possibility of a

one-dimensional numerical model to be used for

the simulation of convective clouds, depending

on the initial conditions and sounding.

Mitseva’s main discoveries are in the field of

cloud physics, namely numerical study of the for-

mation of precipitation and thunderstorm elec-

trification. She discovered relationships between

the type of precipitation (rain, hail, or heavy

hail) at a particular area in Bulgaria and in-cloud

characteristics estimated by a numerical cloud

model. These relations were used to forecast pre-

cipitation and hail intensity in Bulgaria. Some of

her numerical studies show that the positive/neg-

ative dynamical effect due to the seeding of

clouds for rain enhancement may lead to the

decrease/increase of the rain.

In the field of thunderstorm electrification,

her studies attempted to understand better the

microphysical controlling variables that influ-

ence charge transfer and to build the laboratory

Mitseva-Nikolova, Rumyana Petrova 119

data into a model of thunderstorm electric field

growth, in accordance with field observations.

Mitseva’s numerical experiments are directed

to the study of contribution of noninductive

mechanism on the distribution of charge density

in thunderstorms. Based on measurements of

electric field changes associated with lightning,

C. T. R. Wilson (1916) suggested a simple dipole

structure for the charge distribution in thunder-

storms, with positive charge above negative.

Based on field measurements in different types of

clouds, G. Simpson and Scrase (1937) and Simp-

son and C. T. R. Robinson (1941) suggested a

tripole charge structure that includes a lower

region of positive charge. The numerical experi-

ments showed that the so-called noninductive

mechanism is able to explain the formation of

two or three charge layers and that this mecha-

nism plays the most significant role in thunder-

storm electrification at least during the growth

stage of clouds.

However, W. David Rust and Thomas C.

Marshall (1996) recently questioned the analysis

of the tripole model, basing their analysis on bal-

loon-borne studies of electric fields inside thun-

derstorms by Marshall and Rust (1991), S. M.

Hunter et al. (1992), Marshall and Rust (1993),

and Marshall et al. (1995). Maribeth

STOLZEN

BURG

(1998) showed vertical charge profiles

through thunderstorms with several layers of

alternating charge sign; they conclude that the

electrical structure of most thunderstorms is more

complicated than the tripole model. These new

measurements raise questions concerning the par-

ticle-charging mechanisms, which so far have

been invoked to explain only the tripole charge

structure. Stolzenburg et al. in 1998 suggested

that several particle-charging mechanisms are

needed to account for the observations of multi-

ple charge layers alternating in polarity.

A more recent numerical study made by Mit-

seva and colleagues showed that a noninductive

mechanism alone is able to account for the detec-

tion by balloon sounding of more than three

charge layers alternating in polarity. Although

the magnitude of charge is small when the inter-

action of ice crystals and graupel takes place in

the absence of cloud droplets, it affects the charge

distribution in the thunderstorm when the tem-

perature at cloud-top height is at very low.

Mitseva’s discoveries help to understand

more details of the formation of precipitation in

natural and seeded clouds and to contribute to

a better understanding of thunderstorm electri-

fication, which is still unresolved. She has pub-

lished about 30 scientific articles and received a

number of grants from the Royal Society and

120 Mitseva-Nikolova, Rumyana Petrova

Rumyana Petrova Mitseva-Nikolova. Mitseva’s main

discoveries are in the field of cloud physics, namely

numerical study of the formation of precipitation and

thunderstorm electrification. (Courtesy of Rumyana

Petrova Mitseva-Nikolova)

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences which have per-

mitted her to visit UMIST (University of Man-

chester Institute of Science and Technology)

since 1989 to work with her colleagues in the

field of thunderstorm electrification. She also

received grants from the Bulgarian foundation

(National Science Foundation and Science foun-

dation of Sofia University) to work in the field of

cloud physics.

Mitseva’s most important contribution is in

the field of thunderstorm electrification. Based

on the laboratory work at the University of

Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology

(UMIST), done by Clive P. R. Saunders and his

Ph.D. students, laboratory studies showed that

the interaction of ice crystals with graupel pellets

collecting supercooled water droplets can sepa-

rate electric charge, leading to the development

of high electric fields and lightning in thunder-

storms. This mechanism is called noninductive

mechanism because the charge is transferred

independently of the local electric field. It is

believe that this mechanism plays the most

important role (among other mechanisms) in

thunderstorm electrifications.

The experiments established that the sign of

the charge transferred between ice particles

depends on the temperature and liquid water

content in the cloud. Based on the data from lab-

oratory experiments carried out by Saunders and

his students, Mitzeva derived empirical equations

that give opportunity to calculate the magnitude

and sign of the charge transfer at rebounding col-

lisions of ice crystals and graupel as a function of

liquid water content and in-cloud temperature.

The equations were used in numerical models to

study electrification of thunderstorms. She con-

tinues her research as a associate professor in the

department of meteorology, faculty of physics, at

the University of Sofia.

Mitseva-Nikolova, Rumyana Petrova 121

5 Neumann, John Louis von

(Johann)

(1903–1957)

Hungarian/American

Mathematician

Johann von Neumann (later changed to John)

was born on December 28, 1903, in Budapest,

Hungary

. He was the oldest of three sons of Max

Neumann, a banker, and Margaret Kann Neu-

mann. Having a Jewish background, they had to

flee Hungry to Austria when communists took

over briefly in 1919. At an early age, he was pri-

vately tutored, and evidence of his genius was

exhibited by the age of six when he could divide

eight-digit numbers in his head.

From 1911 to 1916, Neumann attended the

Lutheran gymnasium in Budapest, in 1921,

enrolled at the University of Budapest, and also

attended the University of Berlin from 1921 to

1923, studying chemistry and listening to lectures

by Albert Einstein. In 1923, he published a defi-

nition of ordinal numbers, still in use today. He

received a degree in chemical engineering at the

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich

in 1925 and, the following year, his doctorate in

mathematics, with minors in chemistry and

experimental physics, from the University of

Budapest. His thesis was on set theory.

While studying as a Rockefeller Fellow at the

University of Göttingen, in 1927, he met J.

Robert Oppenheimer, who would become a lead-

ing figure in U.S. nuclear research at Los Alamos,

New Mexico, during World War II. Neumann

accepted a lecturer position in mathematics at

the University of Berlin from 1927 to 1930.

While in Berlin, he published a number of papers

that would have major impact in the field of

quantum theory and economics.

Neumann married Marietta Kovesi in Jan-

uary 1930, and the couple had one daughter (but

divorced in 1937). After his marriage that year,

he came to America and became a visiting lec-

turer at Princeton, but within a year, he was a

tenured professor, lecturing on mathematical

hydrodynamics. Two years later he became one of

the six original professors at the university’s newly

formed Institute for Advanced Study.

In 1932, he published Mathematische Grund-

lagen der Quantenmechanik that laid the mathe-

matical foundation of quantum mechanics that

was founded earlier in 1925. From 1933 to 1935,

he took on coediting responsibilities for the

Annals of Mathematics and Compositio Mathemat-

ica, holding both positions until his death.

Neumann became a U.S. citizen in 1937, in

time to receive wartime security clearance and to

begin to work for the U.S. government on the

123