
GFHund · CC BY 3.0
Ben Roy Mottelson
Danish-American nuclear physicist
1926 – 2022aged 95
Ben Roy Mottelson won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that atomic nuclei aren't always the neat spheres textbooks depicted, but can take on distorted, non-spherical shapes that better explain how they behave — work he did in Copenhagen, where he settled after growing up in the United States and spent the rest of his career as a Danish citizen.