Carl Helmholz (1915-2003) was an American physicist involved with the Manhattan Project.
Helmholz was born on May 24, 1915 in Evanston, Illinois. He received a B.A. from Harvard in 1932. After spending a year at Cambridge University, Helmholz applied for the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate program in physics.
At Berkeley, Helmholz worked with the universities 37-inch cyclotron. In 1942 he joined the Manhattan Project. He worked with the Berkeley Radiation Lab’s cyclotrons to separate uranium for experiments at Los Alamos.
After the war, Helmholz continued studying nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He became a full professor of physics in 1951. After that, he was chair of the Berkeley physics department for seven years.
Helmholz died on October 29, 2003 in Lafayette, California.