George Gamow, born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov, was a Russian-born Soviet and American polymath, theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
41 Facts About George Gamow
2.
George Gamow was an early advocate and developer of Lemaitre's Big Bang theory.
3.
George Gamow discovered a theoretical explanation of alpha decay by quantum tunneling, invented the liquid drop model and the first mathematical model of the atomic nucleus, and worked on radioactive decay, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis and Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and molecular genetics.
4.
George Gamow's father taught Russian language and literature in high school, and his mother taught geography and history at a school for girls.
5.
George Gamow learned English in his college years and became fluent.
6.
George Gamow was educated at the Institute of Physics and Mathematics in Odessa and at the University of Leningrad.
7.
George Gamow studied under Alexander Friedmann in Leningrad, until Friedmann's early death in 1925, which required him to change dissertation advisors.
8.
At the university, George Gamow made friends with three other students of theoretical physics, Lev Landau, Dmitri Ivanenko, and Matvey Bronshtein.
9.
George Gamow later used the same phrase to describe the Alpher, Herman, and Gamow group.
10.
George Gamow then worked at the Theoretical Physics Institute of the University of Copenhagen from 1928 to 1931, with a break to work with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
11.
George Gamow continued to study the atomic nucleus, but worked on stellar physics with Robert Atkinson and Fritz Houtermans.
12.
George Gamow worked at a number of Soviet establishments before deciding to flee the Soviet Union because of increased oppression.
13.
Niels Bohr and other friends invited George Gamow to visit during this period, but George Gamow could not get permission to leave.
14.
George Gamow later said that his first two attempts to defect with his wife were in 1932 and involved trying to kayak: first a planned 250-kilometer paddle over the Black Sea to Turkey, and another attempt from Murmansk to Norway.
15.
In 1933, George Gamow was suddenly granted permission to attend the 7th Solvay Conference on physics, in Brussels.
16.
George Gamow insisted on having his wife accompany him, even saying that he would not go alone.
17.
George Gamow became a professor at George Washington University in 1934 and recruited physicist Edward Teller from London to join him at GWU.
18.
George Gamow retained his formal association with GWU until 1956.
19.
George Gamow continued to teach physics at George Washington University and consulted for the US Navy.
20.
George Gamow was interested in the processes of stellar evolution and the early history of the Solar System.
21.
George Gamow published another paper in the British journal Nature in 1948, in which he developed equations for the mass and radius of a primordial galaxy.
22.
George Gamow's work led the development of the hot "big bang" theory of the expanding universe.
23.
George Gamow was the earliest to employ Alexander Friedmann's and Georges Lemaitre's non-static solutions of Einstein's gravitational equations describing a universe of uniform matter density and constant spatial curvature.
24.
George Gamow did this by assuming that the early universe was dominated by radiation rather than by matter.
25.
At first, George Gamow believed that all the elements might be produced in the very high temperature and density early stage of the universe.
26.
George Gamow formulated a set of coupled differential equations describing his proposed process and assigned, as a PhD dissertation topic, his graduate student Ralph Alpher the task of solving the equations numerically.
27.
George Gamow wrote many popular articles as well as academic textbooks on this and other subjects.
28.
George Gamow attempted to solve the problem of how the ordering of four different bases in DNA chains might control the synthesis of proteins from their constituent amino acids.
29.
Crick has said that George Gamow's suggestions helped him in his own thinking about the problem.
30.
George Gamow proposed that these 20 combinations might code for the twenty amino acids which, he suggested, might well be the sole constituents of all proteins.
31.
The specific system that George Gamow was proposing proved to be incorrect.
32.
In 1956, George Gamow became one of the founding members of the Physical Science Study Committee, which later reformed teaching of high-school physics in the post-Sputnik years.
33.
George Gamow continued his teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder and focused increasingly on writing textbooks and books on science for the general public.
34.
George Gamow had a son, Igor George Gamow, with his first wife Rho in 1935.
35.
George Gamow was a well-known prankster, who delighted in practical jokes and humorous twists embedded in serious scientific publications.
36.
George Gamow was a highly successful science writer, with several of his books still in print more than a half-century after their initial publication.
37.
George Gamow conveyed a sense of excitement with the revolution in physics and other scientific topics of interest to the common reader.
38.
George Gamow himself sketched the many illustrations for his books, which added a new dimension to and complemented what he intended to convey in the text.
39.
George Gamow was unafraid to introduce mathematics wherever it was essential, but he tried to avoid deterring potential readers by including large numbers of equations that did not illustrate essential points.
40.
In 1946 George Gamow was a proponent of human spaceflight propelled by atomic energy.
41.
George Gamow was writing My World Line: An Informal Autobiography, which was published posthumously in 1970.