Frederic de Hoffmann

Frederic de Hoffmann (1924 to 1989) was an Austrian-born American nuclear physicist who became the founding president of General Atomics. Born in Vienna, he reached the United States in 1941, graduated from Harvard in 1945 and took his doctorate there in 1948 under Julian Schwinger. He worked at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, where he assisted Edward Teller. In 1955 John Jay Hopkins recruited him at General Dynamics to found General Atomics, a company set up to build nuclear reactors for energy production and sell them on the open market. In the late 1950s he organized Project Orion, a proposed spaceship propelled by nuclear explosions. He also helped found the San Diego campus of the University of California, and from 1970 he served for eighteen years as president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, retiring in 1988 as president emeritus.