A native of
New York City, Richter was born into a
Jewish family in
Brooklyn, and was raised in the
Queens neighborhood of
Far Rockaway. His parents were Fanny (Pollack) and Abraham Richter, a textile worker. He graduated from
Far Rockaway High School, a school that also produced fellow laureates
Baruch Samuel Blumberg and
Richard Feynman. He attended
Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, then continued on to study at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1952 and his PhD in 1956. He then joined the faculty of
Stanford University, becoming a full professor in 1967. Richter was director of the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 1984 to 1999. He was a senior fellow of the
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Paul Pigott Professor in the Physical Sciences Emeritus of Stanford University. When eventually resources were secured, Richter led the building of SPEAR, with the support of the
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. With it he led a team that discovered a new
subatomic particle he called a
ψ (
psi). This discovery was also made by the team led by
Samuel Ting at
Brookhaven National Laboratory, but he called the particle
J. The particle thus became known as the
J/ψ meson. Richter and Ting were jointly awarded the 1976
Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. In 1987, Richter received the Golden Plate Award of the
American Academy of Achievement. Richter was a member of the
JASON advisory group and served on the board of directors of
Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in
American government. Richter was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 2003. In May 2007, he visited
Iran and
Sharif University of Technology. Richter is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President
George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the
Department of Energy’s
Office of Science, the
National Science Foundation, and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology. In 2012, President
Barack Obama announced that Burton Richter was a co-recipient of the
Enrico Fermi Award, along with
Mildred Dresselhaus. In 2013, Richter commented on an open letter from
Tom Wigley,
Kerry Emanuel,
Ken Caldeira, and
James Hansen, that
Angela Merkel was "wrong to shut down nuclear". In 2014, Richter was among the residents of a continuing care retirement center who filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against a continuing care retirement home's financial practices. Richter died on July 18, 2018, in
Stanford, California, at the age 87. ==See also==