He was born to a
Jewish family in
New York City, the oldest child of Leah (Rosenfeld) and Israel Hauptman. He was married to Edith Citrynell since November 10, 1940, with two daughters, Barbara (1947) and Carol (1950). He was interested in
science and mathematics from an early age which he pursued at
Townsend Harris High School, graduated from the
City College of New York (1937) and obtained an M.A. degree in mathematics from
Columbia University in 1939. After the war he started a collaboration with
Jerome Karle at the
Naval Research Laboratory in
Washington, D.C., and at the same time enrolled in the
Ph.D. program at the
University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Maryland in 1955 in mathematics with a dissertation in the number theory classification. This combination of mathematics and
physical chemistry expertise enabled them to tackle head-on the
phase problem of
X-ray crystallography. His work on this problem was criticized because, at the time, the problem was believed unsolvable. By 1955 he had received his Ph.D. in mathematics, and they had laid the foundations of the
direct methods in X-ray crystallography. Their 1953 monograph, "Solution of the Phase Problem I. The Centrosymmetric Crystal", contained the main ideas, the most important of which was the introduction of
probabilistic methods through a development of the
Sayre equation. In 1970 he joined the crystallographic group of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo of which he was research director in 1972. During the early years of this period he formulated the neighborhood principle and extension concept. These theories were further developed during the following decades. In 2003, as an
atheist and
secular humanist, he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the
Humanist Manifesto. ==Works==