Gerard p kuiper biography of williams
When Gerard Peter Kuiper was born on 7 December 1905, in Harenkarspel, North Holland, Netherlands, his father, Gerrit Kuiper, was 28 and his mother, Antje de Vries, was 24. He married Sarah Parker Fuller on 20 June 1936. He lived in Mount Hamilton, Santa Clara, California, United States in 1935 and Williams Bay, Walworth, Wisconsin, United States in 1940. He registered for military service in 1925. He died on 23 December 1973, in Mexico City, Mexico, at the age of 68.
Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper ignored the traditional boundaries of his subject. Using telescopes and the laboratory, he made the solar system a familiar, intriguing place. “It is not astronomy,” complained his colleagues, and they were right. Kuiper had created a new discipline we now call planetary science.
Kuiper was an acclaimed astronomer of binary stars and white dwarfs when he accidentally discovered that Titan, the massive moon of Saturn, had an atmosphere. This turned our understanding of planetary atmospheres on its head, and it set Kuiper on a path of staggering discoveries: Pluto was not a planet, planets around other stars were common, some asteroids were primary while some were just fragments of bigger asteroids, some moons were primary and some were captured asteroids or comets, the atmosphere of Mars was carbon dioxide, and there were two new moons in the sky, one orbiting Uranus and one orbiting Neptune.
He produced a monumental photographic atlas of the Moon at a time when men were landing on our nearest neighbor, and he played an important part in that effort. He also created some of the world’s major observatories in Hawai‘i and Chile. However, most remarkable was that the keys to his success sprang from his wartime activities, which led him to new techniques. This would change everything.
Sears shows a brilliant but at times unpopular man who attracted as much dislike as acclaim. This in-depth history includes some of the twentieth century’s most intriguing scientists, from Harold Urey to Carl Sagan, who worked with—and sometimes against—the father of modern planetary science. Now, as NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper.
“Sears (NASA) has provided a comprehensive biography that illustrates not only Kuiper’s life but also many important astronomical discoveries of the Netherlands-born American astronomer (1905–1973) Not to be confused with the mathematician Nicolaas Kuiper. Gerard Peter Kuiper (KY-pər; born Gerrit Pieter Kuiper, Dutch:[ˈɣɛrɪtˈpitərˈkœypər]; 7 December 1905 – 23 December 1973) was a Dutch-American astronomer, planetary scientist, selenographer, author and professor. The Kuiper belt is named after him. Kuiper is considered by many to be the father of modern planetary science. Kuiper, the son of a tailor in the village of Tuitjenhorn in North Holland, had an early interest in astronomy. He had extraordinarily sharp eyesight, allowing him to see with the naked eye magnitude 7.5 stars, about four times fainter than those visible to normal eyes. He studied at Leiden University in 1924, where at the time a very large number of astronomers had congregated. He befriended fellow students Bart Bok and Pieter Oosterhoff, and was taught by Ejnar Hertzsprung, Antonie Pannekoek, Willem de Sitter, Jan Woltjer, Jan Oort, and the physicist Paul Ehrenfest. He received his candidate degree in Astronomy in 1927 and continued straight on with his graduate studies. Kuiper received his PhD degree from Leiden University in the Netherlands on his thesis on binary stars with Hertzsprung in 1933. He traveled to California to become a fellow under Robert Grant Aitken at the Lick Observatory. In 1935 he left to work at the Harvard College Observatory, where he met Sarah Parker Fuller (1913-2000), whom he married on 20 June 1936. Although he had planned to move to Java to work at the Bosscha Observatory, he took a position at Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago and received American citizenship in 1937. From 1947 to 1949, Kuiper served as the director of the McDonald Observatory in west Texas. In 1949, Kuiper initiated the Yerkes–McDonald asteroid survey (1950–1952). From 1 Gerard P. Kuiper was born in The Netherlands in the town of Harenkarspel on December 7, 1905. He entered Leiden University in 1924 and received his Bachelor of Science in 1927. Kuiper immediately continued his graduate studies and received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1933. While completing his advanced studies, he was an assistant observer at the Leiden Observatory, 1928-1933. From 1933-1935 he was a Kellogg Fellow under American astronomer Robert Grant Aiken at Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, California. In 1935 he went to Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts as a lecturer in Astronomy. There he met Sara Parker Fuller and they married on June 20, 1936. They had two children, Paul Hayes born in 1941 and Sylvia Lucy Ann born in 1947. In 1936 Gerard Kuiper accepted a job at Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of Practical Astronomy. In 1937 he became an American citizen and was appointed associate professor. In 1943 he became a full professor and in 1947 Kuiper became the director of the Yerkes and McDonald Observatories. In 1960 he resigned from Yerkes Observatory and relocated to the University of Arizona in Tucson. Some of his best known discoveries during his tenure at the University of Chicago are: the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan in 1944, the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars in 1948, Uranus's satellite Miranda in 1948, and Neptune's satellite Nereid in 1949. In 1960 Kuiper established the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), first as part of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and later as a separate unit at the University of Arizona. In his years at LPL Kuiper established a group of telescopes in the Santa Catalina Mountains above Tucson; made balloon spectroscopic observations of the Earth's atmosphere; and conducted observatory site surveys in Hawaii, Mexico, and California. He was principal investigator on the NASA Ranger program, and as an experimenter on the Surveyor programs in the mid 19 Gerard Kuiper
Early life and education
Career