James Rainwater

Leo James Rainwater (1917-1986) was an American physicist who contributed to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. In 1949 he proposed, against the prevailing consensus, that atomic nuclei are not always spherical, a theory later confirmed experimentally by Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson, and for which the three shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics. He spent most of his academic career at Columbia University.