George Uhlenbeck

George Uhlenbeck was a Dutch-American physicist who lived from 1900 to 1988, known for co-discovering electron spin with Samuel Goudsmit in 1925 and for formalizing the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process describing Brownian motion as a stochastic phenomenon. He held professorships at the University of Michigan across two periods, 1927 to 1935 and 1939 to 1960, and later worked at the Rockefeller Institute from 1960 to 1971, also extending kinetic theory to quantum gases through the Uehling-Uhlenbeck equation. He received the National Medal of Science in 1977 and served as president of the American Physical Society in 1959. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1979.