Hofstadter, Robert 1915-90
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in New York City, he was educated at City College, New York, and Princeton University. He then worked at the Norden Laboratory Corporation (1943-46) and at Princeton University, before moving to Stanford University where he became professor in 1954. He was also director of the Stanford High Energy Physics Laboratory (1967-74). In 1948 he developed a scintillation counter for X-ray detection. Later at Stanford, he used the linear accelerator to probe nuclear structure, investigating nuclear charge distribution and revealing that protons and neutrons also contain inner structure (now known to be due to quarks). For this work, he shared the 1961 Nobel Prize for physics with Rudolf M�ssbauer. He retired in 1985 but continued to pursue research, including his construction of a gamma ray observatory due to be sent aloft in a space shuttle in 1991.