and education]
Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, to Julius Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish textile importer who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1888, and Ella Friedman, a painter. In 1912 the family moved to an apartment on the eleventh floor of 155 Riverside Drive, near West 88th Street, Manhattan, an area known for luxurious mansions and town houses.[7] Their art collection included works by Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard, and at least three original paintings by Vincent van Gogh.[8] Robert had a younger brother, Frank, who also became a physicist.[9]
Oppenheimer was initially schooled at Alcuin Preparatory School, and in 1911 entered the Ethical Culture Society School.[10] This had been founded by Felix Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed". His father had been a member of the Society for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915.[11] Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, interested in English and French literature, and particularly in mineralogy.[12] He completed the third and fourth grades in one year, and skipped half the eighth grade.[10] During his final year, he became interested in chemistry.[13] He entered Harvard College a year late, at age 18, because he suffered an attack of colitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer vacation in Europe. To help him recover from the illness, his father enlisted the help of his English teacher Herbert Smith who took him to New Mexico, where Oppenheimer fell in love with horseback riding and the southwestern United States.[14]
In addition to majoring in chemistry, he was also required by Harvard's rules to study history, literature, and philosophy or mathematics. He made up for his late start by taking six courses each term and was admitted to the undergraduate honor society Phi Beta Kappa. In his first year he was admitted to graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study, which meant he was not required to take the basic classes and could enroll instead in advanced ones. A course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman attracted him to experimental physics. He graduated summa cum laude in three years
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In the summer of 1921 Oppenheimer contracted dysentery on a prospecting trip to Europe. The illness prevented him from entering Harvard that fall. His father resolved to toughen the boy by sending him with a tutor to the West, where he rode horses and delighted in the outdoors. He grew especially fond of the broad mesas of New Mexico, an attachment that figured prominently later in his life.
In 1922 Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard, where he took an intense program that ranged from math and sciences to philosophy and Eastern religions and French and English literature. Among the sciences, he preferred chemistry because it "starts right at the heart of things." He was nevertheless granted advanced standing to work with experimental physicist Percy Bridgeman. Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude in 1925. Despite his evident success as a scholar, he was plagued with doubts. In a letter to a friend, Oppenheimer concluded a listing of his feverish academic pursuits with the abrupt phrase "and wish I were dead." As an adult he recalled that, during his adolescent and college years, nearly everything about him aroused "a very great sense of revulsion and wrong."
More anxieties were to follow. During his final semester at Harvard, Oppenheimer applied to study with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. Rutherford thought Oppenheimer's credentials inadequate and turned him down. Oppenheimer then applied to Joseph John Thomson at the Cavendish. Thomson accepted Oppenheimer as a research student and gave him the task of preparing thin films of beryllium. Oppenheimer regarded the work as "a terrible bore" and pronounced himself "so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything."
Oppenheimer's inadequacies as an experimental researcher hardened his resolve to turn to theoretical physics. In 1926 he studied with Max Born at the University of Cِttingen in Germany, from which he received his doctoral degree in March 1927. From 1927 through 1928 he was a National Research Council Fellow. The following year he received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. He accepted both and for many years divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley. He attracted a host of brilliant young students and did much to establish the West Coast as one of the nation's most important centers of advanced physics.
Oppenheimer's theoretical work during the late 1920s and through the 1930s has been unfairly dismissed as second rate. In 1927, working closely with Born, he solved a knotty problem involving calculations pertaining to subatomic particles. Oppenheimer concluded that the vibration and spin of protons could be ignored in theoretical calculations because the mass of the proton was incomparably greater than and essentially unaffected by the electron. The concept became known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The next year Oppenheimer demonstrated that, when electrons were excited by a weak electric field, they could "tunnel" their way through the electrostatic forces that bound them to a nucleus. During the early 1930s Oppenheimer and his students applied the conservation laws of energy to posit the existence of a high-energy particle that complemented the electron; the positron was discovered by others in 1932. Oppenheimer's 1939 paper "On Continued Gravitational Contraction" predicted black holes, dying stars whose gravitational pull exceeded their energy production.

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Father: Julius Oppenheimer
Mother: Ella Friedman
Brother: Frank Oppenheimer (physicist, b. 14-Aug-1912, d. 3-Feb-1985)
Wife: Katherine Harrison Puening (m. Nov-1940)
Son: Peter
Daughter: Katherine