George F. Smoot (1945–2025)
Born 1945 CE, died 2025 CE.
George Fitzgerald Smoot III (February 20, 1945 – September 18, 2025) was an American astrophysicist and cosmologist. He shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather "for their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the Cosmic Background Explorer. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." In 2007, Smoot donated $500,000 to fund the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, and an additional amount from his Nobel Prize money, less travel costs, to the East Bay Community Foundation, a charity. Smoot had been at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1970. He was Chair of the Endowment Fund "Physics of the Universe" of Paris Center for Cosmological Physics. Apart from being elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Smoot had been honored by several universities worldwide with doctorates or professorships.
Text from the Wikipedia article George_Smoot, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.