Luis Walter Alvarez (1911-1988)

Awarded the Prize “for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber data analysis.”

American physicist. Alvarez was born in San Francisco on June 13, 1911. He was educated at the University of Chicago where he gained his Ph.D. in 1936. He moved soon after to the University of California at Berkeley. Apart from wartime work on radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, he spent his entire career at Berkeley, serving as Professor of Physics. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Alvarez died in Berkeley, California on September 1, 1988.