Young Jewish Physicist, Considered Heir-apparent to Einstein, to Be Honored Today

Dr. Julian Schwinger, 33-year-old Jewish scientist whom the scientific world considers heir-apparent to Prof. Albert Einstein, will be honored here tomorrow. He will share with Prof. Kurt Goedel, a refugee scientist who came to this country from Vienna in 1939, in the first Einstein Award for achievements in national science. The award, which carries with it $15,000, was established by Lewis L. Strauss, Jewish leader who served as a rear admiral in the Navy during World War II and later as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, in memory of his parents

The award to the two scientists was voted by a commission of scientists headed by Prof. Einstein. The winners will each be given a medal bearing the likeness of Dr. Einstein. Dr. Schwinger, who was born in New York and studied at Columbia, is now Professor of Physics at Harvard, one of the youngest to achieve the rank of professor in the Harvard’s 300-year history. Dr. Goedel, a mathematical logician, is a colleague of Prof. Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study here.

During the last war. Prof. Schwinger worked at the radiation laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he discovered new methods for the treatment of electromagnetic waves, which became the basis for further theoretical and practical work said by the awards committee to have “had great civil and military significance.”

His most recent work has given science a new understanding of the interaction of light and matter and the properties of electrons and light. While he was still in his early twenties, the physicist who was made a full professor in 1947, “contributed many important suggestions about the structure of atomic nuclei” and other matters.

Czechoslovakia-born Dr. Goedel’s work in mathematical logic is regarded, according to the awards committee, “as one of the greatest contributions to the sciences in recent times.”