James Rainwater

Leo James Rainwater was born December 9, 1917, and spent World War II on the Manhattan Project building the first atomic bombs. He joined Columbia's physics faculty in 1946 and by 1949 had begun sketching a theory that defied consensus: certain atomic nuclei weren't spherical but asymmetrical, stretched or flattened in ways no one had seriously considered. Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson later ran the experiments that confirmed he was right. He made full professor by 1952, picked up the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1963, and in 1975 shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for connecting collective motion and particle motion inside the nucleus. He also spent years on X-ray research and worked with the Atomic Energy Commission and Navy projects until his death on May 31, 1986.