Hofstadter was born in New York City on February 5, 1915. He attended elementary and high school in New York City and received his bachelor of science degree from the City College of New York (now the City University of New York). He went on to earn both master's and doctoral degrees in physics at Princeton University, the latter in 1938. During World War II, Hofstadter worked for the National Bureau of Standards. From 1946 to 1950, he was on the faculty at Princeton. Then, in 1950, he moved to Stanford University. He became full professor and head of the physics department at Stanford in 1954.

Hofstadter's major field of interest has been the structure of the atomic nucleus and of the particles that it contains. In the 1920s, G. P. Thomson had used x-ray s and low-energy electron beams to study the structure of atoms. He had been able to show the location of...