Aage Bohr

Origins and early life

Aage Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen on 19 June 1922, the fourth son of Niels Bohr and Margrethe Nørlund, and grew up at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, where Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli were uncles to the children. His father's mother, Ellen Adler, was the daughter of the Danish Jewish banker David Baruch Adler, while his father had been baptized in the Church of Denmark and had left it in 1912.

Work and career

In September 1943 word reached the family that the Nazis considered them to be Jewish, because his grandmother had been Jewish, and the Danish resistance helped them escape by sea to Sweden. He followed his father to Britain and the United States, as his assistant within the British team of the atomic project, until they came home in August 1945. After a master's degree in 1946 and a stay at Columbia University from 1949 to 1950, he reached, independently of a colleague there, the idea that the motion of its particles can deform a nucleus and set it rotating.

Back in Copenhagen he began working with Ben Mottelson, and in 1952 and 1953 the two showed that certain nuclei have rotational spectra, reconciling the shell model with that collective picture. He took his doctorate in 1954, became a professor in 1956, and from 1962 to 1970 succeeded his father at the head of the institute, now named after Niels Bohr.

Recognition

In 1975 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Mottelson and a third physicist, for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection. His place in this directory rests on descent alone, through that Jewish grandmother, the very line by which the occupiers counted his family in 1943.

He died in Copenhagen on 8 September 2009, at the age of eighty-seven, survived by his second wife and his three children.