George Gamow Facts
George Gamow Facts
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| Interesting George Gamow Facts: |
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| Gamow was born in Odessa, Ukraine to mixed Russian and Ukrainian parents. |
| Both of his parents were teachers. |
| In addition to Russian, Gamow spoke French, German and later became fluent in English. |
| From 1922 to 1923 he attended Novorossiya University in Odessa and from 1923 to 1929 he was a student at the University of Leningrad. |
| After graduation he went to the University of Gottingen where he earned a doctorate for his work on quantum theory. |
| He worked with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. |
| In 1931 Gamow was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. |
| In 1932 he and Lev Mysovskii submitted a design for a cyclotron which was not completed until 1937. |
| After several requests to leave the Soviet Union were denied, in 1933 he and his wife, Lyubov Vokmintseva, were suddenly given permission to attend the Solvay Conference in Brussels. |
| Over the next year, Gamow worked at the Curie Institute, the University of London and the University of Michigan. |
| He became a professor at George Washington University and recruited physicist Edward Teller from London. |
| He became a naturalized American citizen in 1940. |
| Despite his knowledge of radioactivity, he did not work on the Manhattan project but turned his interest to the history of the Solar System and cosmology. |
| He created the "big bang" theory of an expanding universe and wrote that the early universe was dominated by radiation not physical matter. |
| In 1956 he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder where he died of liver failure in 1968. |
| His many writings included "The Birth and Death of the Sun" (1940), "One, Two, Three...Infinity" (1947), "The Moon" (1953), and "My World Line: An Informal Autobiography" (1970). |
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