Robert Hofstadter

Hofstadter was born in New York City on February 5, 1915, to Polish Jewish immigrants Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and Henrietta, née Koenigsberg. He attended elementary and high schools in New York City and entered City College of New York, graduating with a B.S. degree magna cum laude in 1935 at the age of 20, and was awarded the Kenyon Prize in Mathematics and Physics. He also received a Charles A. Coffin Foundation Fellowship from the General Electric Company, which enabled him to attend graduate school at Princeton University, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the age of 23. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Infra-red absorption by light and heavy formic and acetic acids." He did his post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania and was an assistant professor at Princeton before joining Stanford University. Hofstadter taught at Stanford from 1950 to 1985. In 1942 he married Nancy Givan (1920–2007), a native of Baltimore. They had three children: Laura, Molly, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter.