Aage Bohr - Life and Career

Life and Career

Bohr was born in Copenhagen in 1922, and grew up surrounded by physicists such as Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg, who were working with his father at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) at the University of Copenhagen.

In 1940, shortly after the German occupation of Denmark, Bohr began his physics degree at the University of Copenhagen. In October 1943, shortly before he was to be arrested by the German police, Niels Bohr escaped to Sweden with his family, later travelling to London and on to work on the Manhattan Project. During this time, Aage Bohr travelled with his father, acting as his assistant and secretary.

The Bohrs returned to Denmark in 1945, and Aage resumed his university education, graduating with a master's degree in 1946, with a thesis concerned with some aspects of atomic stopping problems. Following graduation, he became an associate at the Niels Bohr Institute.

Bohr worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in early 1948, and later at Columbia University from January 1949 to August 1950. While in the US, Bohr married Marietta Soffer; the couple had three children, Vilhelm, Tomas and Margrethe.

Only after doing his Nobel Prize-winning research did Bohr receive his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, in 1954 or 1956. Bohr became a professor at the University of Copenhagen in 1956, and, following his father's death in 1962, succeeded him as director of the Niels Bohr Institute, a position he held until 1970. He was also a member of the board of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) from its inception in 1957, becoming its director in 1975. In 1978 he was elected to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.