Manuel Sandoval Vallarta

Who was Manuel Sandoval Vallarta?

Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was a Mexican physicist. He was a Physics professor at both MIT and the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico City into a family that descended from Ignacio Vallarta, a prominent liberal leader during the War of Reform. He received his S.B. in physics from MIT in 1921; in 1924, MIT awarded him his Ph.D. He joined MIT's physics faculty in 1923, eventually rising to the rank of full professor. In 1927, Vallarta received a two-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study physics in Germany. The Universities of Berlin and Leipzig hosted him, and he was able to learn from Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg.

While at MIT, Vallarta was a mentor to Richard Feynman and Julius Stratton. In fact, he was the co-author of Feynman's first scientific publication, a letter to Physical Review concerning the scattering of cosmic rays. This led to an interesting Feynman story:

Vallarta let his student in on a secret of mentor-protégé publishing: the senior scientist's name comes first.