Hartland Snyder

Hartland Sweet Snyder (1913 to 1962) was an American physicist who is known for the Oppenheimer-Snyder model, which showed how large stars would collapse to form black holes. He was born in Salt Lake City, received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Utah in 1937 and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940, with a dissertation supervised by J. Robert Oppenheimer. He served on the physics faculty at Northwestern University from 1940 to 1947 and then joined Brookhaven National Laboratory. With Ernest Courant and Milton Stanley Livingston he developed the principle of strong focusing that made modern particle accelerators possible, and the Courant-Snyder parameters are named for him. He died on May 22, 1962, after a heart attack.