Robert Coveyou was a mathematician and health physicist that worked at both the Met Lab in Chicago and at the X-10 graphite reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Coveyou was born in Petoskey, Michigan in 1915 and moved to Detroit at the age of 2. He graduated from Cooley High School in Detroit and was a scholarship student at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1933.
Very early in the Second World War, he was a radio instructor for military recruits in St. Louis. He was recruited for the Manhattan Project, where he was one of the original group of health physicists under Karl Z. Morgan. Morgan, considered by some to be the "Father of Health Physics" later described Bob's knowledge of mathematics as crucial to the early work of the group at Oak Ridge.
After the War, Coveyou returned briefly to Chicago to finish his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and then in the next year, received his M.S. in Math from the University of Tennessee, all while employed at X-10 (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). He spent the remainder of his career at Oak Ridge in several divisions, always as a research mathematician. His work in mathematics became prominent after the publication of an article entitled, "Random Number Generation Is Too Important to Be Left to Chance." Coveyou passed away in Oak Ridge in 1996.