Nobel Prize Recipient. Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer, a 32-year-old German physicist, received worldwide recognition after being awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics. Jointly, he shared this coveted award with American scientist Robert Hofstadter. He received 13 nominations for the Nobel candidacy, with all submitted in 1961. He received the award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, for "his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma radiation and his discovery in this connection of the effect, which bears his name," the Mössbauer Effect, and is also called recoil-free gamma-ray resonance absorption. In a gas a recoil effect occurs when an atom emits a photon. In 1957, which was before he earned his doctorate degree, he discovered that the recoil can be eliminated if the atoms are embedded in a crystal structure. This made available opportunities to study energy levels in atomic nuclei, and how these are affected by their surroundings and various phenomena. The Mössbauer Effect was used to verify Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and to measure the magnetic fields of atomic nuclei. Little is documented about his early years, but starting as a child, he was a talent pianist. After graduating from high school in 1948 with no college preparatory classes, he found employment for one year in industrial laboratories, which led him to enroll in classes at the Technical University, graduating in 1952. He then went to the Max Planck Institute of Medical Research in Heidelberg, researching under Professor Heinz Maier-Leibniz. Since he could not obtain a doctorate degree at that facility, he left in 1955 with the goal to earn that degree. He received his doctorate degree in 1958 still studying his thesis under Professor Maier-Leibniz while at the Laboratory for Applied Physics at Technical University in Munich. At the invitation of Professor Richard Feynman, who would receive the 1965 Nobel Prize, he traveled in 1961 to the United States for a position at the California Institute of Technology, where he advanced rapidly from Research Fellow to Senior Research Fellow; he was appointed a full professor of physics in early 1962. After a total of three years, he returned to Munich to become professor of physics at his Alma Mater, the Technical University, where he developed a science department based on the ideas from his United States visit. He was an excellent teacher, giving undergraduate lectures in 1984 to 350 students enrolled in his physics course. In 1997 he retired as a professor emeritus. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received in 1960 the Prize of the Research Corporation New York; in 1961 the Röntgen Prize of the University of Giessen and the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute; in 1974 Guthrie Medal from the Institute of Physics of London; in 1984 the Lomonosov Gold Medal from USSR; and in 1986 the Einstein Medal of Einstein Society from Switzerland. He belonged to many professional organizations including in the United States the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He published a host of research papers during his career, which most were not only in German but English. He married twice. With his first wife, he had a son and two daughters.