Henry Draper Medal

MARTIN Schwarzschild, professor of astronomy at Princeton University, was awarded the National Academy of Sciences’ Henry Draper Medal on April 24 for his contributions to the understanding of stellar evolution. Dr. Schwarzschild, an authority on variable stars and the theory of stellar interiors, has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1947. A native of Potsdam, Germany, with a PhD from the University of Göttingen, he came to the United States in 1937 as a Littauer Fellow at Harvard, and remained to teach at Columbia University and to serve in the American Army during the second World War. In 1957, his work as director of Project Stratoscope, in which he has employed unmanned balloons to take telescopic photographs of the sun from altitudes far above the earth’s surface, won him the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.