Abraham Pais

(1918-2000) Physicist

Abraham Pais was a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his PhD from the university of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II. When the Nazis began the forced relocation of Dutch Jews, he went into hiding, but was later arrested and saved only by the end of the war.

He then served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Pais wrote books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics.

He was a physics professor at Rockefeller University until his retirement.