Nobel Prize Recipient. John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, an American physicist and mathematician, was the co-recipient of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics, sharing the award with Sir Nevill F. Mott of Cambridge University in England and with one of Van Vleck's students, Philip Anderson, an American, who was a professor at Cambridge University. They were awarded the coveted prize "for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems." Their research was considered "loosely related" by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His Nobel Prize nominations are closed to the public. He was awarded for research he achieved in the 1930s. In 1932, he wrote his second academic book entitled, "The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities," which documented his findings that made him a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Regarded as the "Father of Modern Magnetism", he established the fundamentals of quantum mechanical theory of magnetism and crystal field theory. Born the only child into a wealthy family of a Dutch heritage, his father and grandfather respectively were professors of mathematics and of astronomy. He had not planned to follow in their footsteps, yet later changed his mind and decided to be a professor. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1920 and then Harvard University for his masters in 1921 and doctorate in 1922. He was offered an assistant professorship to teach with only graduate courses at the University of Minnesota in 1923, a year after receiving his Ph. D. at Harvard. During World War II, he developed wavelength principles for radar and contributed to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was the first "modern" Dean of Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard University, serving from 1951 to 1957, when he resumed a less public position as professor. Starting in 1961, he taught at Oxford University and Balliol College in England as a visiting professor. During his long and successful career, he published numerous research papers dealing with magnetism with the last being published fifty years after the first one. He was described as a longtime colleague of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient Edward M. Purcell. Among the many honors that he received besides the Nobel Prize were the Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Wesleyan University in 1936 and Oxford University, the Irving Langmuir Award in 1965, the National Medal of Science in 1966, elected a Foreign Member of Royal Society in 1967, the Elliot Cresson Medal in 1971, and the Lorentz Medal in 1974. He and his wife, Abigail June Pearson, were art collectors. In the 1980s, the "Van Vleck Collection" was donated to the Chazen Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The couple had no children. His inheritance from his father made him comfortable financially for the rest of his life. His father has in his honor the E. B. Van Vleck Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He retired in 1969, but continue to write papers as he traveled around the world. His health declined in 1975 requiring the insertion of a pacemaker and five years later, he died.