Young Genius.

Born in New York City, J. Robert Oppenheimer completed the four-year undergraduate program at Harvard University in three years, studying classical languages as well as chemistry and physics and graduating summa cum laude in 1925. He spent the next four years traveling in Europe and studying at Cambridge University and then at the University of Gottingen, where he worked with physicist Max Born and earned a Ph.D. in 1927. Oppenheimer also spent time with physicists Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden and Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich.

Berkeley.

When Oppenheimer returned to the United States in 1929, he was twenty-five and had already published sixteen papers on various aspects of theoretical physics. He received a joint appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and California Institute of Technology, leading centers of physics research in the country. Within just a few years Oppenheimer earned a reputation as a dynamic and revered...