Klein, Martin J.

Martin J. Klein was born on June 25, 1924, in New York City. He received his A.B. in 1942 and A.M. in 1944 from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948. He was a member of the Operations Research Group for the U. S. Navy from 1945 to 1946. Klein returned to MIT in 1946 as a research associate in physics. From 1949 to 1967 he held various academic appointments in physics at Case Institute of Technology. He joined Yale in 1967 as professor of the history of physics and chaired the Department of History of Science and Medicine from 1971 to 1974. In 1974 he was named Eugene Higgins Professor of History of Physics and Professor of Physics. In 1991 he was named Bass Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics. He retired from Yale in 1999. Klein published on the history of physics and biographies of prominent physicists including Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, and J. Willard Gibbs. In 2005 Klein received the American Physical Society/American Institute of Physics's Abraham Pais Prize for the History of Physics for his research in nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics. He died on March 28, 2009, at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.