Dr. John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on July 9, 1911. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1933 at the age of 21. He served as professor of physics at Princeton University from 1938 to 1976 before moving to the University of Texas at Austin where he served as the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics from 1976-1986. After leaving the University of Texas at Austin, Wheeler returned to Princeton as an emeritus professor.

Wheeler was a pioneer in particle physics and nuclear physics. He started collaborating with Neils Bohr in 1939 on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission and participated in the development of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan project beginning in 1941. After the end of World War II, Wheeler continued to work for the government, interrupting his research to help develop the hydrogen bomb as part of the Matterhorn Project, promote the building of fallout shelters, and support the Vietnam War and missile defense. His later work in areas such as general relativity and gravitational collapse was groundbreaking, and he is widely credited with popularizing the term “black hole” in 1967. Wheeler received the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Award from President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 and was awarded the Wolf Prize in physics in 1997.

Despite his fame in the field, Wheeler always gave high priority to teaching. He continued to teach freshman and sophomore physics classes throughout his teaching career and maintained an office at Princeton until 2006. Wheeler died on April 13, 2008.