Willard Libby

Willard Frank Libby was an American physical chemist who lived from 1908 to 1980. He is noted for his role in developing radiocarbon dating in 1949, a process that revolutionized archaeology and paleontology, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960. A 1931 chemistry graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned his doctorate in 1933, he studied radioactive elements and developed sensitive Geiger counters to measure weak radioactivity. During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project's gaseous diffusion process for uranium enrichment at Columbia University. After the war he joined the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies, where he developed the technique for dating organic compounds using carbon-14, and later served on the Atomic Energy Commission before becoming a professor of chemistry at UCLA.