John C. Mather

John Cromwell Mather (b. August 7, 1946 in Roanoke, Virginia), is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist.

Mather is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with George F. Smoot for "their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This work helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe using the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science". ^[1]

Biography

Education and initial research

• 1968 B.Sc. (Physics), Swarthmore College
• 1974 Ph.D. (Physics), University of California, Berkeley
• 1974～76 (NRC Postdoctoral Fellow), Columbia University Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Participation in COBE

As an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, he led the proposal efforts on COBE (1974-1976). The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation^[2].

He chronicled his team's work in a book for the general public. The book, The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe ^[3] was co-written with John Boslough, and published in 1996.

Recent projects

Awards

• Open Scholarship (honorary), Swarthmore, 1964-68
• William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, 1967, 30th place nationwide
• NSF Fellowship and honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellowship 1968-70
• Hertz Foundation Fellowship, 1970-74
• NRC Postdoctoral Fellow,1974-76
• John C. Lindsay Memorial Award (NASA-GSFC), 1990
• Rotary National Space Achievement Award, 1991
• National Air and Space Museum Trophy, 1991
• Aviation Week and Space Technology Laurels, 1992, for Space/Missiles
• Discover Magazine Technology Award finalist, 1993
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space Science Award, 1993
• Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics, 1993 (presented Jan. 1994)
• Goddard Fellow, 1994, GSFC
• Honorary Doctor of Science Degree, Swarthmore College, 1994
• John Scott Award, City of Philadelphia, 1995
• Rumford Prize, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996
• Fellow, American Physical Society, 1996
• Hall of Fame, Aviation Week and Space Technology, 1997
• Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1997
• Marc Aaronson Memorial Prize, 1998
• Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998
• Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, Franklin Institute, 1999
• George W. Goddard Award, Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, 2005
• Cosmology Prize, with COBE Team, Peter Gruber Foundation, 2006
• Nobel Prize in Physics, 2006
• SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering Fellow, 2007

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