Katharine Way

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Katharine Way (born February 20, 1903 in Sewickley , Pennsylvania , † December 9, 1995 in Chapel Hill , North Carolina ) was an American physicist and professor. She worked for the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago .

life and work

Way studied physics from 1929 to 1934 at Columbia University , where she wrote her first paper with Edward Kasner and graduated in 1932 with a bachelor's degree in physics. She then moved to the University of North Carolina and became the first PhD student in nuclear physics with John Archibald Wheeler . After a year of teaching at Bryn Mawr College , she was a lecturer and assistant professor at the University of Tennessee from 1939 to 1942 . From 1942 to 1945 she worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago in the Metallurgical Laboratory on reactor design, evaluation of reactor constants and organization of radioactivity data for fission products. Way examined neutron flux data from Enrico Fermi's experiments. Your calculations helped build Chicago Pile -1. Way also examined reactor constants and how fission products could "poison" nuclear reactors (as in the case of the sudden shutdown of B Reactor at Hanford in 1944). The theoretical work with Eugene Wigner led to the so-called Way-Wigner formula , which calculates the beta decay rates of fission products. In 1945 she signed the Szilard petition and moved to Oak Ridge , Tennessee, where she continued her work on fission products at Clinton Laboratories and developed an interest in compiling papers on nuclear data. Concerned about the atomic bomb and its use against Japan , Way was co-editor of the book One World or None. In 1947, Way moved to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington, DC, where she worked on data evaluation and applied research. She co-authored a series of publications that made the Nuclear Data Sheets and founded the Nuclear Data Project in 1953 . In 1964, she agreed with Academic Press to create a new journal, Nuclear Data Sheets, to publish the voluminous data she and her colleagues had produced, and in 1965 she was instrumental in creating a second journal called Atomic Data and Nuclear Data involved. In 1968 she became an associate professor at Duke University in North Carolina .

Awards

Publications (selection)

literature

  • Howes, Ruth H .; Herzenberg, Caroline L .: Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project, 1999, Temple University. ISBN 978-0-585-38881-6
  • Ware, Susan; Braukman, Stacy Lorraine: Notable American Women: a Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, 2004, ISBN 0-674-01488-X
  • Wheeler, John Archibald: Some Men and Moments in the History of Nuclear Physics: The Interplay of Colleagues and Motivations, 1979, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. OCLC 6025422.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Way, Katharine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Way, Katharina; Way, Kay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH February 20, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Sewickley , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 1995
Place of death Chapel Hill , North Carolina