Born to a secular Jewish family in Berlin, his family emigrated to
Barranquilla, Colombia in 1939 to escape persecution from the Nazis in
World War II. When he moved to the United States in the 1950s, Nauenberg studied at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his doctorate in 1960 from
Cornell University under
Hans Bethe with a thesis on particle physics. He then became a visiting fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study. From 1961 to 1965, he was Assistant Professor of Physics at
Columbia University. From 1964 to 1966 he was Visiting Physicist at
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and
Stanford University. In 1966 he became Professor of physics at the
University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). He played a crucial role in the development of the UCSC Physics Department in its early days and he was instrumental in developing both Stevenson and Crown Colleges. He was also from 1988 to 1994 director of the Institute for Nonlinear Science at UCSC. After his retirement in 1994, he became Research Professor of Physics at UCSC. He was a visiting professor at various research institutions and universities in Europe. Nauenberg worked in the field of particle and nuclear physics as well as theoretical
solid state physics,
astrophysics and
nonlinear dynamics. His most-cited result, written in collaboration with
Nobel laureate Tsung-Dao Lee, is the
Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem (KLN theorem). Since the 1990s, he has published numerous works on the history of science, especially about physicists from the 17th century. Among them are works on the work of
Isaac Newton,
Robert Hooke and
Christiaan Huygens. In addition, he published contributions to 20th-century physicists, including
Edmund Clifton Stoner and
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. From 1963 to 1964 he held a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and from 1964 to 1966 he was a
Sloan Research Fellow. From 1989 to 1990 he was a scholarship holder of the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2013, he received the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award for his influential work on the history of science. When Nauenberg died in 2019, the UCSC Emeriti Association and the Nauenberg family established a History of Science Lecture series at UCSC in his honor. ==References==