John C. Mather

John C. Mather is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist whose work on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer, COBE, satellite provided precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. He shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with George Smoot for their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation, a result the Nobel committee described as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science. Mather earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Swarthmore College in 1968 and a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974, and has spent his career as a senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He later served as senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope from 1995 to 2023, and Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007.