Richard Garwin - Biography

Richard Lawrence Garwin (born April 19, 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio), is an American physicist. He received his bachelor's degree from the Case Institute of Technology in 1947 and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1949, where he worked in the lab of Enrico Fermi.

Garwin is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. For many years he was an adjunct professor of physics at Columbia University and, from 1952, a scientist at the IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University, retiring from IBM in 1993. He has also been an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

Garwin received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for the fields of science and engineering, award year 2002.

Among other things, Garwin was the author of the actual design used in the first hydrogen bomb (code-named Mike) in 1952. He was assigned the job by Edward Teller, with the instructions that he was to make it as conservative a design as possible in order to prove the concept was feasible (as such, the Mike device was not intended to be a usable weapon design, with tons of cryogenic equipment required for its use).

While at IBM, he was the "catalyst" for the discovery and publication of the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm, and did research on inkjet printing.

Garwin is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He also served on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States in 1998. He is also a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.

See also

• Megawatts and Megatons

External links

• Annotated Bibliography for Richard Garwin from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• Dr. Richard Garwin's personal web site
• The Garwin Archive
• Oral History interview transcript with Richard Garwin 23 October 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives
• Oral History interview transcript with Richard Garwin 7 June 2001, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives
• Oral History interview transcript with Richard Garwin 24 June 1991, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives