18 Facts About Katharine Way

Katharine "Kay" Way was an American physicist best known for her work on the Nuclear Data Project.

Katharine Way became an adjunct professor at Duke University in 1968.

Katharine Way was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, the second child of William Addisson Way, a lawyer, and his wife Louise Jones.

Katharine Way had an older brother and a younger sister.

Katharine Way's mother died when she was twelve years old, and her father married an ear and throat specialist, who provided Kay with a role model of a career woman.

Katharine Way was educated at Miss Hartridge's boarding school in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut.

From 1929 to 1934 she studied at Columbia University, where Edward Kasner stoked an interest in mathematics, and co-authored Katharine Way's first published academic paper.

Katharine Way next went to the University of North Carolina, where John Wheeler stimulated an interest in nuclear physics, and she became his first PhD student.

Katharine Way subsequently took up a teaching position at the University of Tennessee in 1939, becoming an assistant professor in 1941.

At a conference in New York in 1938, Katharine Way presented a paper, "Nuclear Quadrupole and Magnetic Moments", in which she examined deformation of a spinning atomic nucleus under three models, including Niels Bohr's liquid drop model.

Katharine Way followed this up with a closer examination of the liquid drop model in a paper entitled "The Liquid-Drop Model and Nuclear Moments", in which she showed that the resulting cigar-shaped nucleus could be unstable.

One day [Katherine Katharine Way] came in and reported a difficulty.

Katharine Way visited the Hanford Site and the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Katharine Way moved to Washington, DC, in 1949, where she went to work for the National Bureau of Standards.

The NDP moved to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1964, but Katharine Way remained its head until 1968.

Katharine Way persuaded the editors of Nuclear Physics to add keywords to the subject headings of articles to facilitate cross-referencing.

Katharine Way left the NDP in 1968 and became an adjunct professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, although she continued as editor of Nuclear Data Sheets until 1973, and Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables until 1982.

Katharine Way died at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on December 9,1995.