Nobel Laureate Scientist. He was an American scientist who was one of three scientists receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2005. He received half of the monetary prize while American scientist, John Lewis "Jan" Hall and German scientist, Theodor W. Hänsch, shared the second half. The oldest of the three, he received the coveted award, according to the Nobel Committee, "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence." Born into a blue-collar family, his formal education at first was in several public schools in New York. After receiving a scholarship to Harvard University, he received a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949. During World War II, he was recruited for the Manhattan Project, making him one of the youngest researchers at age 18. After graduation, he conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and at the California Institute of Technology. Upon returning to Harvard University, he was made Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics in 1952. In 1988 he was an adjunct Professor of optical Sciences at the University of Arizona as well as a visiting professor to various European colleges. His work, which later earned him a Nobel Prize, centered on the theory that advanced the understanding of light by describing the behavior of light particles. This theory merged the field of optics with quantum physics into the new field of quantum optics. Practical applications of his work included the development of highly secure codes in the field known as quantum cryptography. His research also had a central role in efforts to develop a new generation of computers, so-called quantum computers, which would be extraordinarily fast and powerful and use quantum-mechanical phenomena to process data as qubits, or quantum bits, of information. Besides the Nobel Prize in 2005, he earned many other awards and honors in his career, including recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1996, the fourth recipient of the Max Born Award from Germany, and having several states in the science of Physics named in his honor.