John Van Vleck

Born on 13 March 1899 in Middletown, Connecticut, John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who came to be known as the “father of modern magnetism.” Van Vleck grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, in an academic environment; his father was a mathematics professor, and his grandfather, a professor of astronomy. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1920 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University, Van Vleck accepted teaching posts at the universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin. His first area of focus was on optical spectra, which became the subject of his first book, Quantum Principles and Line Spectra, published in 1926. In the 1930s Van Vleck developed a theory of magnetism based on quantum mechanics, and in 1932 published his seminal work, The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities. In 1934 he returned to Harvard, as a professor of physics, where he would remain until he retired. Among the many honors he received was the Irving Langmuir Award in 1965, the National Medal of Science in 1966, and the Lorentz Medal in 1974. For his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electrons in magnetic, noncrystalline solids, Van Vleck was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics , along with his former student Philip Anderson and English physicist Nevill Mott. Van Vleck died of heart failure at age 81 in 1980. You can read the transcript from a 1977 interview with Van Vleck here . (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 13 March 1899