George Eugene Uhlenbeck

Born Dec. 6,1900, in Batavia, now Jakarta, Java; died 1974. American physicist of Dutch nationality.

Uhlenbeck graduated from the University of Leiden in 1927. That year he moved to the USA, where he worked at the University of Michigan from 1927 to 1935 and from 1939 to 1959. From 1935 to 1939 he was a professor at Utrecht (the Netherlands). He was president of the American Physical Society in 1959. Beginning in 1961, he was a professor at Rockefeller University in New York.

In 1925, together with S. Goudsmit, Uhlenbeck advanced the idea of electron spin. His later research dealt with statistical mechanics: the theory of Brownian motion, the kinetic equation for a quantum gas (with E. Uehling), and the expression for the second virial coefficient in terms of phase shifts.