George Eugene Uhlenbeck

George Eugene Uhlenbeck (December 6, 1900, Batavia, Dutch East Indies – October 31, 1988, Boulder, Colorado) was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist. In 1925, he and Samuel Abraham Goudsmit introduced the concept of electron spin, which posits an intrinsic angular momentum for the electron. Another of Uhlenbeck's important contributions is the co-invention of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process, which describes Brownian motion of particles in a flu... more

George Eugene Uhlenbeck (December 6, 1900, Batavia, Dutch East Indies – October 31, 1988, Boulder, Colorado) was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist. In 1925, he and Samuel Abraham Goudsmit introduced the concept of electron spin, which posits an intrinsic angular momentum for the electron. Another of Uhlenbeck's important contributions is the co-invention of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process, which describes Brownian motion of particles in a fluid with friction. Uhlenbeck married Else Ophorst in August 1927. During the Second World War he worked at MIT as a member of the team working on the development of radar. Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit were awarded the Max Planck medal in 1964. Uhlenbeck was also awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1970 and Wolf Prize in Physics in 1979. In addition, Uhlenbeck served as President of the American Physical Society in 1959. Uhlenbeck was a student of Austrian physicist and mathematician Paul Ehrenfest and colleague and friend of many of the great physicists of... less