Dieter Kurath

Dieter Kurath, a pioneer of understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus, died on August 4, 2013 at age 91. Kurath was born in 1921 and was an undergraduate at Brown University. He served in the US army at Los Alamos from 1944-1946 where he was a member of the Special Engineering Detachment. There he was assigned to the Theoretical Division and assisted in numerical calculations needed for the design of a fission bomb.

After the war he became a graduate student at the University of Chicago and did his thesis under the supervision of Maria Goeppert Mayer, whose seminal insight regarding the importance of a shell structure for nuclei in 1948 was later recognized by a Nobel Prize.

Kurath received his PhD in 1951 and joined the Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where Maria Mayer was also employed. He spent all of his professional career at Argonne, with the exception of a year in Copenhagen as a Guggenheim Fellow, and continued to be active in research for twenty years after his formal retirement.

Dieter was among the first to develop the shell model into a quantitative tool that could be used to calculate many nuclear properties. His early work was crucial in helping to understand the detailed experimental information that was beginning to flow in the 1950’s.

In the 1960’s, he and Stan Cohen, another Argonne physicist, were the first to utilize the power of the early electronic computers for calculations of the properties of atomic nuclei. Dieter’s modeling of nuclear structure turned out to be remarkably accurate. In fact in the 1960’s and 70’s a standing joke among experimental physicists was that there was little point in doing measurements – all one had to do was to look at the Kurath calculations. His work was recognized around the world and many came to work with him from Europe, Japan, and elsewhere.

Kurath’s knowledge, insights, and understanding, his systematic approach, hard work and considerable mathematical ability were coupled with a very modest and generous personality. He was always helpful and patient with naive questions from colleagues and students. He listened carefully and if he did not have an immediate answer he would say he had to think about it and he usually had a detailed answer within hours.

Dieter Kurath’s work was an important early pillar in establishing the framework of our understanding of atomic nuclei. He was a tremendous asset to his colleagues at Argonne and to the nuclear structure community in the U.S. and around the world.