Anderson was born in New York City on September 3, 1905. He earned his bachelor of science degree in physics and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 1927 and his Ph.D. from the same institution three years later. Upon graduation, Anderson was appointed to the faculty at Cal Tech and became professor of physics there in 1939. During World War II he served with the Cal Tech Artillery Rocket Project. After the war, he used military B-29 aircraft in his studies of cosmic radiation. He returned to Cal Tech and served as chairman of the division of physics, mathematics, and astronomy from 1962 to 1970. He retired from Cal Tech in 1976 and died in San Marino, California on January 11, 1991.

Anderson is best known for his discoveries of the positive electron ( positron) in 1932 and the meson in 1935. Both discoveries came about as a result of his research on cosmic rays begun in...