About Arno Allan Penzias
Arno Allan Penzias (; April 26, 1933 – January 22, 2024) was an American physicist and radio astronomer. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson "for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation". == Early life, family and education == Penzias was born in Munich, Germany, the son of Justine (née Eisenreich) and Karl Penzias, who ran a leather business. His grandparents had come to Munich from Poland and were among the leaders of the Reichenbachstrasse synagogue. At age six, he and his brother Gunther were among the Jewish children evacuated to Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation. Later, his parents also fled Nazi Germany, first for the UK, and then for the US, and the family settled in the Bronx, New York City, New York, in 1940. In 1946, Penzias became a US citizen. After he graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1951, he enrolled at the City College of New York to study chemistry, but he changed majors to physics and graduated in 1954, ranked near the top of his class. Penzias thereafter served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a radar officer for two years. == Career == Penzias' involvement with radar in the Signal Corps led to a research assistantship in the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory, which was then heavily involved in microwave physics.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.