# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/willis-lamb
# Generated: 2026-09-07T18:55:02.868Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/willis-lamb"
name: "Willis Lamb"
slug: "willis-lamb"
description: "A hydrogen atom looked simple until Willis Lamb measured it closely enough to find electrons sitting where quantum theory said they shouldn't be — a tiny shift that cracked open a hole in the physics of the 1940s and handed him a Nobel Prize."
tagline: "American physicist (1913–2008)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Willis_Lamb_1955.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "US"
category:
  name: "Scientists"
  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
  name: "Scientist"
  slug: "scientist"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1913-07-12"
deathDate: "2008-05-15"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was born July 12, 1913, and spent his career as an American physicist chasing precision in places others assumed were settled. His measurements of electron energies in hydrogen atoms turned up an unexpected discrepancy — electrons occupied energy levels that deviated slightly from what Dirac's equations predicted. The finding, which became known as the Lamb shift, forced a reckoning with quantum electrodynamics and earned him a share of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Polykarp Kusch. He later taught at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, where he remained until his death on May 15, 2008.