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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Albert Cahn Jr.

Junior PhysicistChicago, IL

Manhattan Project VeteranProject Worker/Staff
Chicago Pile-1

Albert Cahn, Jr. (1910-1978) was a junior physicist at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory (“Met Lab”) during the Manhattan Project. Cahn later also worked as a mathematician.

In 1948, he was appointed to work at the newly formed Institute for Numerical Analysis (INA). The INA was temporarily housed at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC prior to the completion of its permanent facilities at UCLA in Los Angeles, California.

The INA’s first two projects were the “Characteristic roots of matrices” and “Applications of automatic digital computing machines in algebra and number theory.” Cahn’s role in the projects was mostly administrative. He served as  Assistant to the Director from 1948-1953.

He died in August 1978 in Los Angeles, California.

For more information about the INA, please see the following reference:

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