Isidor Isaac Rabi

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1898, Rabi arrived in New York as an infant and grew up on the Lower East Side. He entered Cornell in 1916 for electrical engineering, switched to chemistry, then found physics. After earning his doctorate at Columbia on crystal magnetism, he spent 1927 in Europe working alongside the era's top physicists. Back at Columbia in 1929, he developed the Breit-Rabi equation with Gregory Breit and refined nuclear magnetic resonance techniques to measure atomic nuclei with startling accuracy - work that claimed the Nobel in 1944 and seeded both modern chemistry and medical imaging. During the war he split time between MIT's radar lab and the Manhattan Project. He spent the postwar decades advising presidents, chairing the Atomic Energy Commission's key committee, and helping birth Brookhaven and CERN. Columbia named him its first university professor in 1964; he taught until 1967 and stayed on as emeritus until his death in 1988.