Manuel Sandoval Vallarta

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Sculpture representing Manuel Sandoval Vallarta in Mexico City.

Manuel Sandoval Vallarta (born February 11, 1899 in Mexico City , † December 14, 1977 there ) was a Mexican physicist . He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is known for research on cosmic radiation .

Vallarta came from a distinguished family in Mexico. Ignacio Luis Vallarta, a politician and first Mexican foreign minister, was one of his ancestors . He studied at MIT with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1921 and his doctorate in 1924. He was a member of the faculty from 1923 and became a professor at MIT. In 1927 he received a Guggenheim scholarship in Berlin and Leipzig, where he heard from Albert Einstein , Erwin Schrödinger , Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg , among others . Richard Feynman (who published his first scientific paper on cosmic rays with him) and Julius Stratton were among his students at MIT . From 1943 he was partly at UNAM and moved there entirely in 1946. In the same year he became a member of their board of directors. He has served on a number of Mexican state commissions on science.

Grave of Manuel Sandoval Vallarta in Mexico City

Together with Georges Lemaître, Vallarta discovered the variation of cosmic radiation with geographical latitude as a result of the interaction with the earth's magnetic field. He worked with Luis Walter Alvarez and Arthur Holly Compton on the composition of cosmic rays from protons.

In 1928 Vallarta was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1952 he became a member of the Legion of Honor and in 1961 he received the National Exact Science Prize of Mexico. He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences .

literature

  • Ruth Gall, Obituary in Physics Today, December 1977

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Feynman, Vallarta: Scattering of cosmic rays by the stars of a galaxy, Phys Rev, Volume 55, 1938, pp. 340–343
  2. ^ Lemaitre, Vallarta, On Compton's latitude effect of cosmic radiation , Phys. Rev., Volume 43, 1933, p. 87, abstract
  3. ^ Lemaitre, Vallarta, L. Bouckaert The north-south asymmetry of cosmic radiation , Phys. Rev., Vol. 47, 1935, 434-436
  4. ^ Lemaitre, Vallarta On the Geomagnetic Analysis of Cosmic Radiation , Phys. Rev., Volume 49, 1936, p. 719
  5. ↑ Lemaitre, Vallarta, Phys. Rev., Volume 50, 1936, p. 493
personal data
SURNAME Vallarta, Manuel Sandoval
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mexican physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Mexico city
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1977
Place of death Mexico city