Lamb, Willis Eugene, Jr. (1913-2008), an American atomic physicist, shared the 1955 Nobel Prize with Polykarp Kusch. Working independently, they discovered slight deviations from the Dirac theory on the behavior of the hydrogen atom (see Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice ). Lamb was cited for his discoveries of the hyperfine structure of the hydrogen spectrum.
Lamb was born on July 12, 1913, in Los Angeles. He taught at the University of California; Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and Yale universities; and the University of Arizona. Lamb died on May 15, 2008.
