Stern, Otto 1888-1969
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Sohrau, Germany, and educated at Breslau University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1912, he held posts at the universities of Zurich, Frankfurt and Rostock before becoming Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Hamburg (1923-33). With the rise of the Nazis he moved to the USA, where he became Research Professor of Physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (1933-45). In collaboration with Walther Gerlach in 1920-21, he projected a beam of silver atoms through a non-uniform magnetic field and produced two distinct beams, thus proving the quantum theory prediction that an atom's magnetic moment can only be oriented in two fixed directions relative to an external magnetic field. For this work he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1943. He also determined the magnetic moment of the proton.