Home > Willard Libby

Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado . He received his B.S. (1931) and Ph.D. (1933) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where he then became a lecturer and later assistant professor. Libby spent the 1930s building sensitive geiger counters to measure weak natural and artificial radioactivity. In 1941 he joined Berkeley's chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma.

Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent most of 1941 at Princeton University. After the start of World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University with Nobel laureate Harold Urey. Libby was responsible for the gaseous diffusion separation and enrichment of UraniumUranium is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol U and atomic number 92. A heavy, silvery-white, toxic, metallic , and naturally- radioactive element, uranium belongs to the actinide series and its isotope uranium-235 is used as the-235 which was used in the atomic bomb on HiroshimaFor the town that was formerly named Hiroshima in Hokkaido, see Kitahiroshima. Hiroshima City (; -shi) is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chugoku region of western Japan. It is best known throughout the world as the first.

In 1945Events January January 5 The Soviet Union recognizes the new pro-Soviet government of Poland. January 7 British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge. January 12 World War II: he became a professor at the University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a university located in Chicago, Illinois. Just over a century old, it includes departments and committees of: Physics, Economics, Music (theory), Sociology, Linguistics, Political Science, Social Thought, International Relati. In 1954Events January events January 14 The Hudson Motor Car Company merges with Nash-Kelvinator forming the American Motors Corporation January 14 Marilyn Monroe weds Joe DiMaggio. January 15 Mau Mau leader Waruhiu Itote is captured in Kenya January 20 The Nati, he was appointed to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In 1959, he became Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley, a position he held until his retirement in 1976. He taught honors freshman chemistry from 1959-1963 (a University tradition that senior faculty teach this class). He was Director of the University of California statewide Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) for many years including the lunar landing time. He also started the first Environmental Engineering program at UCLA in 1972.

In 1960, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for leading the team (namely, post-doc James Arnold and graduate student Ernie Anderson, with a $5,000 grant) that developed Carbon-14 dating.