Tate was born on 28 July 1889 in Lenox, Iowa. He was the younger of the two sons of Samuel Aaron Tate, a physician, and Minnie Maria (Ralston) Tate. As a child he lived in several Iowa towns, including Keokuk. His mother died when he was about twelve, and he was sent to live with an uncle in New York City while his father practiced medicine on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.
After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in New York, Tate entered the University of Nebraska, from which he received the degrees of B. S. (1910) and M. A. (1912). He then pursued graduate study at the University of Berlin, working under the noted physicist James Franck, and was awarded the Ph. D. in 1914.
Returning to the United States after his study in Berlin, Tate taught physics for two years at the University of Nebraska before becoming an instructor at the University of Minnesota in 1916. Immediately successful, he rose through the ranks to become a full professor in 1920 at the age of thirty-one, despite having spent a year as a first lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps. He remained at Minnesota for the rest of his life.
In 1919 Tate developed an introductory graduate course in theoretical classical physics, which he continued to teach until 1937. Few of Tate's students would dispute the assertion of Henry A. Erikson, the department chairman who first brought Tate to Minnesota, that they owed their success "in a large measure to his influence in this course. " Tate's remarkable ability to extract and spontaneously present the essence of a scientific paper with clarity and precision, thereby opening up still unexplored vistas for his students, coupled with his personal generosity, modesty, and high standards, made him an outstanding teacher and an esteemed colleague. In contrast to almost every other American university, quantum theory flourished at Minnesota in the mid-1920's, under the leadership of Tate and J. H. Van Vleck.
By the time of World War II, well over half of the students who had received Ph. D. degrees in physics at Minnesota, many of them destined for future eminence, had had Tate as their thesis advisor. Tate's experimental researches at the University of Minnesota grew naturally out of his interest in electron collision and ionization phenomena, an interest first stimulated by Franck at Berlin. Tate and his students concentrated principally on the electron bombardment of numerous gaseous molecules and compounds, studying the efficiency and other aspects of the attendant ionization and dissociation processes. These studies not only yielded a great deal of specific information on the structure and internal force fields of the molecules in question; they also led to the refinement of such precision experimental techniques as those of mass spectroscopy, which in 1940 enabled Alfred O. C. Nier, a student of Tate's, to separate the uranium isotopes at Minnesota. In the late 1930's Tate was instrumental in securing a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the construction of the university's 4 Mev accelerator, and in 1946 he helped obtain funds from the navy to establish its distinguished cosmic ray program.
Tate influenced the direction of physics in this country and abroad not only through his teaching and research, but also through his work in professional associations. The American Physical Society chose him in 1926 as managing editor of the Physical Review, a post he held until his death. Under his leadership, the journal grew steadily in size, circulation, and prominence. He was directly responsible for founding two additional publications of the society: the successful and respected Reviews of Modern Physics in 1929, which he also edited until his death, and Physics (later the Journal of Applied Physics) in 1931, which he edited for six years.
Tate was appointed dean of the College of Science, Literature, and the Arts at the University of Minnesota in 1937. Despite his scientific background, he continually stressed the importance of the humanities and social sciences to a liberal education, and as dean he was in full accord with the academic reforms that were effected by Minnesota's president Lotus Delta Coffman. With the onset of World War II, Tate's special talents were enlisted by the United States government. His position as chief of Division 6 (on subsurface warfare) of the National Defense Research Committee (1941 - 1945) kept him away from campus on a full-time basis, and in 1944 he resigned his deanship.
He returned to the University of Minnesota after the war as research professor, but he continued his government service as chairman of the board of governors of the Argonne National Laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1949.
Tate died in Minneapolis at the age of sixty of a cerebral hemorrhage. After cremation his ashes were scattered.
For his and his division's achievements, which greatly improved the Allies' defenses against submarines, Tate received the United States Presidential Medal of Merit (1947) and, from Britain, King George's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom. The Tate Laboratory of Physics at the University of Minnesota, dedicated in 1966, was named in his honor, as was the John Torrence Tate International Gold Medal of the American Institute of Physics.
A Presbyterian by upbringing, he had no religious affiliation in later life.
With Karl T. Compton, Tate helped found in 1932 the American Institute of Physics, serving from the beginning on its governing board and as chairman, 1936-1939. He was president of the American Physical Society in 1939 and in 1942 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Tate married Lois Beatrice Fossler of Lincoln, Nebr. , on December 28, 1917. Their only child, John Torrence, became a distinguished mathematician. Tate's first wife died in 1939, and on June 30, 1945, he married Madeline Margarite Mitchell, manager of publications of the American Institute of Physics.
He was a German physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gustav Hertz.
He is distinguished for many fundamental contributions in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry and related areas in algebraic geometry.
