Background
Morton Hamermesh was born on December 27, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of Isador J. and Rose (Kornhauser) Hamermesh.
160 Convent Ave, New York, NY 10031, United States
In 1936 Morton got a Bachelor of Science from the City College of the City University of New York.
New York, NY 10003, United States
Morton received a Doctor of Philosophy from New York University in 1940.
Photo of Morton Hamermesh
Photo of Morton Hamermesh
educator physicist researcher author
Morton Hamermesh was born on December 27, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of Isador J. and Rose (Kornhauser) Hamermesh.
In 1936 Morton got a Bachelor of Science from the City College of the City University of New York. In addition, he received a Doctor of Philosophy from New York University in 1940. His thesis dealt with the passage of neutrons through crystals and polycrystals; in it, he examined the deviations from the assumed additivity of nuclear cross-sections.
Morton Hamermesh's teaching career began at City College, where he was a physics instructor for two years. He continued work on the magnetic scattering of neutrons, with an emphasis on the atomic form factors, while a postdoc with Felix Bloch at Stanford University. He returned to New York University and took a leave of absence to work at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University from 1943 to 1946. He worked on problems related to the scattering and absorption of radar. On returning a second time to New York University, he resumed an old collaboration with Julian Schwinger on the scattering of slow neutrons by ortho- and para-hydrogen and deuterium and obtained results that were important in the determination of nuclear scattering lengths.
Hamermesh then joined the staff at Argonne National Laboratory, where he started as a senior physicist and eventually became director of the physics division. In 1959, Mort became associate laboratory director in charge of basic research. He continued to involve himself as much as possible in the scientific work being done in chemistry, biology, and materials science.
In 1965, Morton accepted a position as head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. He came at a time when there was a great need to expand the faculty. In a very collegial fashion, he worked with the faculty to start or enhance a number of programs that were previously understaffed: High-energy physics, condensed matter physics, and astronomy began their growth under his direction.
Morton left for a year in 1970 to head the physics department at SUNY Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University), but to the great relief of his Minnesota colleagues, he returned to continue to lead the School of Physics and Astronomy through 1975. He retired in 1985.
As a researcher, Hamermesh made several important contributions to physics, including designs to improve the function of particle accelerators and techniques to better understand atomic structures.
A contributor to scientific journals and editor of the Journal of Mathematical Physics from 1970 to 1978, Hamermesh was the author of Group Theory (1962) and co-author of A Review of Undergraduate Physics (1986).
Hamermesh established the style that the prime responsibility of a scientist was to do first-rate science and that it was the role of management to protect scientists from bureaucratic distractions. He was deeply involved with everything that was going on in the division, and he worked on a number of experiments, including a measurement of the electron-neutron interaction.
Hamermesh was a member of the American Physical Society and Research Society of America.
In addition to physics and mathematics, Morton had two passions: chess and languages. In chess, he achieved world-class status, coming in sixth in the United States Chess Open in 1945. He studied languages all his life. One of the earliest benefits that the physics community had from that passion was his translation of Lev Landau and Evgenii Lifshitz's The Classical Theory of Fields (Addison-Wesley) in 1951, which alerted many readers to the riches to be found in the books by those authors.
Morton married Madeline Goldberg in 1941. They had three children: Daniel S., Deborah R., and Lawrence A.