Hartland Snyder

Hartland Sweet Snyder (1913 – May 22, 1962) was an American physicist^[1] who, together with J. Robert Oppenheimer, showed how large stars would collapse to form black holes.^[2] This work modeled the gravitational collapse of a pressure-free homogeneous fluid sphere and found that it would be unable to communicate with the rest of the universe.^[3] This discovery was depicted in the movie Oppenheimer, where Snyder was portrayed by actor Rory Keane.^[4] Historian of physics David C. Cassidy assessed that this prediction of black holes might have won a Nobel Prize in Physics had the authors been alive in the 1990s when evidence was available.^[5]

Some publications Snyder authored together with Ernest Courant laid the foundations for the field of accelerator physics.^[6] In particular, Snyder with Courant and Milton Stanley Livingston developed the principle of strong focusing that made modern particle accelerators possible. The Courant–Snyder parameters, a method of characterizing the distribution of particles in a beam, were an important part of that contribution.^[7]