Sommerfield studied for his bachelor's at
Brooklyn College and earned his Ph.D. from
Julian Schwinger at
Harvard University in 1957. He worked at
Berkeley and
Harvard for two years each before becoming professor at Yale in 1961. He was a fellow of
Trumbull College. Additionally, he has held visiting positions at the
Institute for Advanced Study and the
University of Florida. He is notable for his work on
high-energy physics. He is one of the namesakes of the
Bogomol'nyi–Prasad–Sommerfield bound and the
Bogomol'nyi–Prasad–Sommerfield state, along with his graduate student M.K. Prasad. Another notable graduate student he supervised was
Howard Georgi. Sommerfield was elected a fellow of the
American Physical Society in 1968. ==See also==