Leo Goldberg

Leo Goldberg (26 January 1913 – 1 November 1987) was an American astronomer who held professorships at Harvard and the University of Michigan and the directorships of several major observatories. He was president of both the International Astronomical Union and the American Astronomical Society. His research focused on solar physics and the application of atomic physics to astronomy, and he led many of the early efforts to study the Sun from space telescopes.

Goldberg was born in the Brooklyn section of New York City to immigrant parents from eastern Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). He lived in a tenement building in Brooklyn with his parents and two brothers, one two years older and the other some eight years younger, until it was destroyed by a fire in 1922. The fire killed his mother and infant brother, and hospitalized the nine-year-old Leo and his older brother. Goldberg was in hospital for some months and his brother for over a year. In 1924 Goldberg's father remarried, and a year later the family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts. His father, a milliner, set up a store there and Goldberg worked there on his evenings and weekends during his high school years.

Goldberg was encouraged by career guidance councilors at the school to pursue a career in engineering, since he did well in science and math classes. He originally decided to apply to MIT, but since this would have put him and his brother—who had been placed in the same year as him because of his extended hospital stay—in competition for a single scholarship he decided to withdraw and work in his father's store for another year.

In 1930 he enrolled in the Harvard Engineering School on a tuition scholarship from the New Bedford Harvard Club. While there he took an introductory astronomy course, and decided to change his major to astronomy at the start of his fourth year.

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