Schramm, David N.

David N. Schramm was born on Oct. 25, 1945, in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his M.A. and S.B. in physics from MIT in 1967, and studied physics with Gerald Wasserberg and Nobel laureate William Fowler at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in 1971. Schramm was also a champion Greco-Roman wrestler who competed in college and graduate school, and was a finalist in the 1968 Olympic trials. He coached the Caltech wrestling team to three consecutive conference championships, and continued his involvement with wrestling throughout his career.

Schramm was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech until July, 1972, when he became assistant professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1974, he joined the University of Chicago as Associate Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics. He became Professor in the Department of Physics in 1977. He was Chairman of Astronomy & Astrophysics from 1977 to 1984, and was named the Louis Block Professor of the Physical Sciences in 1982. He became Vice President for Research in 1995.

Schramm's work was described in an obituary in The University of Chicago Chronicle:

Schramm was a world leader in theoretical astrophysics and perhaps the leading authority on the Big Bang model of the formation of the universe. He did important work across the discipline of astrophysics, and he is more responsible than any other individual for the recent merging of the fields of particle physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics in the study of the early universe.

Schramm's most important work was in cosmology -- the study of the very early universe -- and the connection between particle physics, nuclear physics and cosmology.

His most fundamental contribution may have been his calculation of the number of families of elementary particles in the universe. At a time when two families of particles were known, and when most physicists assumed that many more families of particles would be found, Schramm and his colleagues boldly predicted that physicists would probably find only one more family. In 1989, his prediction was confirmed by experiments at particle accelerators in Stanford and Geneva, marking the first time that astronomy had been used to make a fundamental discovery in physics, rather than the very common reverse.

Schramm also did much of the essential work to show how the light elements -- including hydrogen, deuterium, helium and lithium -- were produced in the Big Bang. That work was considered crucial to the establishment of the current "hot Big Bang theory" of the universe's birth.

His calculation of the amount of "ordinary matter" in the universe helped show that it accounted for only a fraction of the universe's mass, leading to the bold prediction that "exotic dark matter" comprises most of the universe.

Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate and former director of Fermilab, said, “David Schramm was a man who was eternal, and competent in everything. His death is a huge loss. He was everywhere and very active, and thought very broadly about science and its role in society. He was one of the major architects of our present model of the creation of the universe, and was someone who was always a leader.” Schramm and Lederman co-authored a book, From Quarks to the Cosmos: Tools of Discovery, which tried to explain to the general public how the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of quarks are connected. The Drafts and pre-prints of this book are in this collection. Schramm was the author or coauthor of more than 350 scientific papers and 15 books, including The Shadows of Creation: Dark Matter and the Structure of the Universe, with E.M. Riordan.

In 1993, Schramm was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society “for his manifold contributions to nuclear astrophysics.” He received the Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1978 as well as numerous other awards and named lectureships. In 1994, he received the University’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1986, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1995 and a foreign fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1995.

Schramm was killed Dec. 19, 1997, when the twin-engine plane he was piloting crashed outside of Denver. He was en route from his home in Chicago to his second home in Aspen, Colorado. He was 52.

From the guide to the Schramm, David N. Papers, 1960-1998, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)