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Katharine "Kay" Way (February 20, 1902 – December 9, 1995)〔''Physics Today'' gives her year of birth as 1903 and her date of death as December 8.〕 was an American physicist best known for her work on the Nuclear Data Project. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. She became an adjunct professor at Duke University in 1968. == Education and early life == Katharine Way was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, the second child of William Addisson Way, a lawyer, and his wife Louise Jones. She had an older brother and a younger sister. Originally named Catherine, she later changed her name to Katharine. Friends and colleagues generally knew her as Kay. Her mother died when she was twelve years old, and her father married an ear and throat specialist, who provided Kay with a role model of a career woman. Way was educated at Miss Hartridge's boarding school in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1920 she entered Vassar College, but was forced to drop out after two years after becoming ill with suspected tuberculosis. After convalescing in Saranac Lake, New York, she attended Barnard College for a couple of semesters in 1924 and 1925. From 1929 to 1934 she studied at Columbia University, where Edward Kasner stoked an interest in mathematics, and co-authored Way's first published academic paper. She finally graduated with her BS in 1932.〔 She next went to the University of North Carolina, where John Wheeler stimulated an interest in nuclear physics, and she became his first PhD student. Because jobs were hard to come by during the Great Depression, she stayed on as a graduate student after completing the requirements of her PhD. In 1938, she became a Huff Research Fellow at Bryn Mawr College, which allowed her to receive her PhD for her thesis on nuclear physics about the "Photoelectric cross section of the deuteron",〔 She subsequently took up a teaching position at the University of Tennessee in 1939, becoming an assistant professor in 1941. At a conference in New York in 1938, Way presented a paper on "Nuclear Quadrupole and Magnetic Moments" in which she examined deformation of a spinning atomic nucleus under three models, including Niels Bohr's liquid drop model. She followed this up with a closer examination of the liquid drop model in a paper entitled "The Liquid-Drop Model and Nuclear Moments", in which she showed that the resulting cigar-shaped nucleus could be unstable. Wheeler later recalled that: 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Katharine Way」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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