Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz

Who was Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz?

Ross Lomanitz was an American physicist.

He was born in Bryan, Texas and grew up in Oklahoma. His father was an agricultural chemist and named his son after the Italian socialist Giovanni Rossi, who had founded an agricultural commune in Brazil in the 1890s. Lomanitz graduated from high school at age 14 and went on to earn his bachelor of science degree in physics from the University of Oklahoma and his doctorate in theoretical physics from Cornell University under Richard Feynman.

In the early 1940s Lomanitz started graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, he became a protégé of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Lomanitz worked at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory on a new method of electromagnetic separation of isotopes. Lomanitz's graduate research was cut short when he was drafted into the Army during World War II.

During the period 1942-45 Oppenheimer was responsible for the employment on the atomic bomb project of Lomanitz. Oppenheimer urged him to work on the Manhattan Project, although Oppenheimer later told government security personnel that he knew Lomanitz had been very much of a "red" when he first came to the University of California.