James P. Gordon: Difference between revisions

J. P. Gordon was born in [[Brooklyn]], [[New York (state)|New York]], on March 20, 1928, and was raised in [[Forest Hills, Queens]] and [[Scarsdale, New York]].<ref name=NYTObit/> His father, Robert S. Gordon was a lawyer and worked as VP and General Counsel for National Dairy, now Kraftco. Gordon attended Scarsdale High School and [[Phillips Exeter Academy]] (Class of 1945). In 1949, he received a bachelor's degree from the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) and joined the physics department of [[Columbia University]] as a graduate student. He received his Masters and PhD degrees in physics in 1951 and 1955, respectively. In the framework of his doctoral research he designed, built and demonstrated the successful operation of the first maser together with [[Herbert J. Zeiger]] and with his doctoral advisor [[Charles H. Townes]]. The invention of the maser won the Nobel Prize in Physics, which C.H. Townes shared in 1964 with the Russian scientists [[Nikolay Basov|N. Bassov]] and [[Alexander Prokhorov|A. Prokhorov]]. Starting in 1955 and until his retirement in 1996, Gordon worked as a scientist at AT&T Bell-Laboratories, where in the period between 1958 and 1980 he headed the Quantum Electronics Research Department, located initially in [[Murray Hill, New Jersey|Murray Hill]] and later in [[Holmdel Township, New Jersey|Holmdel Township]], both in the state of New Jersey. In 1962–1963, he spent one year as a visiting Professorprofessor at the [[University of California, San Diego]].