George Cowan

George Arthur Cowan (15 February 1920 to 20 April 2012) was an American nuclear chemist.^1,3 Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, he studied chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and worked under Eugene Wigner at Princeton on experiments to find out whether a chain reaction could be sustained in uranium.² In the Manhattan Project he was moved from site to site as a troubleshooter, and was one of very few people who knew its separate components.^1,2 He spent nearly forty years at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a scientist, director of chemistry, associate director of research and senior fellow.^1,2 In 1949 he led the analysis of fallout samples that showed the Soviet Union had a nuclear bomb, and he later developed ways to measure the yield of hydrogen bombs, for which he received the E. O. Lawrence Award; he received the Enrico Fermi Award in 1990.^1,2

On the White House Science Council under President Reagan he dealt with problems that crossed science, policy, economics and the environment, and became a critic of the fragmentation of science and an early advocate of the quantitative study of complex adaptive systems.¹ From 1982 to 1984 he was the central figure in founding the Santa Fe Institute, which began in the convent of a former parochial school. He was its first president from 1984 to 1991 and stayed on its board of trustees until his death.^1,2 In his own research he studied nonlinear dynamics, and helped lead a brain-imaging study of children's development.¹ He was also a founding director of Los Alamos National Bank, its chairman for thirty years, and an early board member of the Santa Fe Opera.¹

The Santa Fe Institute entry tells how it grew out of weekly discussions he held with senior colleagues at Los Alamos from 1982, which David Pines and Murray Gell-Mann joined.