Richard L. Garwin

Richard Garwin
Richard Garwin (2011)
Born	Richard Lawrence Garwin (1928-04-19) April 19, 1928 (age 88) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Chicago Columbia University Cornell University Harvard University
Alma mater	Case Institute of Technology (B.S.) University of Chicago (Ph.D.)
Thesis	An experimental investigation of the beta-gamma angular correlation in beta decay (1949)
Doctoral advisor	Enrico Fermi
Notable awards	Presidential Medal of Freedom National Medal of Science Grande Médaille de l'Academie des Sciences

Richard Lawrence Garwin (born April 19, 1928) is an American physicist, widely known to be the author of the first hydrogen bomb design.

Garwin received his bachelor's degree from the Case Institute of Technology in 1947, and two years later his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Enrico Fermi at the age of 21. Another of Fermi's students, Marvin L. Goldberger, claims that Fermi said that "Garwin was the only true genius he had ever met".

After graduating from the University of Chicago, Garwin joined the physics faculty there and spent summers as a consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratory working on nuclear weapons. 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. He also worked on the development of the first spy satellites, for which he was named one of the ten founders of national reconnaissance. While at IBM, his work on spin-echo magnetic resonance laid the foundations for MRI; he was the catalyst for the discovery and publication of the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm, today a staple of digital signal processing; he worked on gravitational waves; and played a crucial role in the development of laser printers and touch-screen monitors. He has been granted 47 patents and has published over 500 papers.

In December 1952, he joined IBM's Watson laboratory, where he worked continuously until his retirement in 1993. He is currently IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. During his career Garwin divided his time between applied research, basic science, and consulting to the U.S. Government on national-security matters.In parallel to his appointment at IBM, he held at different periods an adjunct professorship in physics at Columbia University; an appointment as the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University; and a professorship in public policy, and in physics, at Harvard University. He has also been the Philip D. Reed Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, NY.