About
Mexican-American physicist and the father of singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña, and an uncle of John C. Baez. He made important contributions to the early development of X-ray microscopes and later X-ray telescopes.
Before Fame
He earned degrees in mathematics from Drew University and Syracuse University. He married Joan Chandos Bridge, the daughter of an Episcopalian priest, in 1936. The couple became Quakers. They two had three daughters (Pauline, Joan, and Mimi), then moved to California, where he enrolled in Stanford's doctoral program in physics.
Trivia
In 1948, he co-invented, with his doctoral program advisor, Paul Kirkpatrick, the X-ray reflection microscope for the examination of living cells. A microscope is still used in medicine today. He was also a pacifist, and instead of going into the defense industry, he went into education and humanitarianism.
Family Life
He was born in Puebla, Mexico in 1912. His father Reverend Alberto B. Baez Fonseca was a Methodist minister. He was four when his father moved his family to the U.S., first to Texas for a year and then to New York City. He and his sister and brother grew up in Brooklyn where his father founded the First Spanish Methodist Church.
Associated With
In 1974, the British Open University awarded him an honorary degree. Other honorary degree winners include Tim Berners Lee, physicist Brian Cox, and Terry Pratchett.
