Glenn Theodore Seaborg (born 19.04.1912) — an American chemist and physicist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1948). Born in Ishpeming. He graduated from the University of California (1934), where he has worked to the present day (professor from 1945; in 1954—61 and from 1972 deputy director of the E. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley; in 1958—61 chancellor of the university). In 1942—46, at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, he headed the plutonium part of the Manhattan Project; in 1961—71 he was chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission.
His research was in the fields of radiochemistry, nuclear chemistry and nuclear physics. He directed and took part in American work on the synthesis, separation and study of isotopes. He took part in the discovery of many transuranium elements: plutonium (1940), americium and curium (1944), berkelium (1949), californium (1950), einsteinium (1952), fermium (1953), mendelevium (1955) and elements 102 and 106. He discovered the fissile isotopes plutonium-239 and uranium-233. In 1942 he put forward the hypothesis that a family of actinides exists and created the actinide theory, which played an important part in the systematics and the prediction of the properties of the heavy transuranium elements.
With his colleagues he identified more than 100 isotopes, many of which found wide application. He developed extremely delicate methods of studying the properties of a countable number of atoms of radioactive actinides. In 1951 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of plutonium-239.
He founded a scientific school. A member of many academies of sciences and learned societies, in particular a foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1971). President of the American Chemical Society (1976). The E. Fermi Prize (1959), the B. Franklin Medal (1963) and others.