John Hasbrouck Van Vleck

John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was an American physicist and mathematician, born in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1899, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977 for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electronic magnetism in solids, sharing the prize with Philip W. Anderson and Nevill Mott. He established the fundamentals of the quantum mechanical theory of magnetism, crystal field theory and ligand field theory, and is regarded as the Father of Modern Magnetism. The son of the mathematician Edward Burr Van Vleck, he grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, received an A.B. from the University of Wisconsin in 1920 and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1922 under the supervision of Edwin C. Kemble. During the Second World War he worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Lab and took part in the Manhattan Project.