George Smoot

George Fitzgerald Smoot III (February 20, 1945 – September 18, 2025) was an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and Nobel laureate. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".

This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the COBE satellite. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." In 2007, Smoot donated $500,000 to fund the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, and an additional amount from his Nobel Prize money, less travel costs, to the East Bay Community Foundation, a charity.

Smoot had been at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1970. He was Chair of the Endowment Fund "Physics of the Universe" of Paris Center for Cosmological Physics. Apart from being elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Smoot had been honored by several universities worldwide with doctorates or professorships. He was also the recipient of the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2006), the Daniel Chalonge Medal from the International School of Astrophysics (2006), the Einstein Medal from the Albert Einstein Society (2003), the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (1995), and the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal from NASA (1991). He was a member of the advisory board of the journal ''Universe''.

Smoot was one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Provided by Wikipedia