Robert Herman

Robert Herman ( born August 29, 1914 in Bronx, New York, † February 13, 1997 in Austin, Texas) was an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist.

Herman studied physics at the City College of New York ( completion in 1935 ) and at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in 1940 with an experimental thesis on molecular spectra. From 1942 he worked at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. In this time, the joint work with Ralph Alpher fell and George Gamow in which they the cosmic background radiation predicted in 1948. At the time it was hardly noticed, the background radiation was detected only in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson of Bell Laboratories in 1978 for the Nobel prize was awarded. Herman and Alphers work but was recognized by the award of the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1993.

In 1956 Herman was at General Motors Research Lab, where he partly in collaboration with Elliott Montroll was devoted to the modeling of traffic flows. From 1979 he was professor of physics, and yet of Engineering (Civil Engineering) from the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1993 he was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize.