Hofstadter, Robert, 1915–90, American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Princeton, 1938. He taught at Princeton from 1938 to 1950 and also worked at the National Bureau of Standards during World War II. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Stanford and remained there until his retirement in 1985. Hofstadter shared the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rudolf Mössbauer for his pioneering work in uncovering the structure and composition of neutrons and protons, the particles that make up the nuclei of atoms. He was the first to discover that atomic particles have definite shapes and sizes, and he pinpointed the distribution of charge and magnetic moment in atomic nuclei.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.