George Gamow

George Gamow (1904 to 1968) was a Soviet and American theoretical physicist and cosmologist, born in Odessa and educated in Leningrad, who later worked at George Washington University. He found the theoretical explanation of alpha decay by quantum tunnelling, invented the liquid drop model, the first mathematical model of the atomic nucleus, and applied tunnelling to the inverse process to calculate rates of thermonuclear reactions in stars. That work on energy generation and element production in stars led him into cosmology, where he was an early developer of the Big Bang theory and of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and he predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation. He also wrote popular science books, including One Two Three... Infinity, and received UNESCO's Kalinga Prize in 1956 for popularizing science.