Frederic de Hoffmann

Who is Frederic de Hoffmann?

Frederic de Hoffmann was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He came to the United States of America in 1941 and graduated from Harvard in 1944. Upon graduating, de Hoffmann was sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory where he assisted Edward Teller in the development of the Hydrogen bomb. Frederic de Hoffmann was an advocate of peaceful atomic energy.

After leaving Los Alamos, de Hoffmann collaborated with Hans Bethe and Silvan Schweber on a textbook called Mesons and Fields and became chairman of the Committee of Senior Reviewers of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. He received his Ph.D from Julian Schwinger in 1948.

Frederic De Hoffmann moved to the General Dynamics Corporation in 1955. That year he was recruited by John Jay Hopkins to found General Atomic and serve as its first president. This organization's purpose was to manufacture nuclear reactors for energy production, and sell them on the open market. In the late '50s he organized Project Orion, a plan for a spaceship to be propelled by nuclear bombs.

He helped found the University of California's campus in San Diego.