Anderson, Carl David

Anderson, Carl David (1905-91), American physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson was born in New York City and educated at the California Institute of Technology, where he attained full professorial rank in 1939. In 1932 he discovered the positron, or positive electron, one of the fundamental subatomic particles. For this achievement he was awarded, with Victor Franz Hess, the 1936 Nobel Prize in physics. In 1936 Anderson also confirmed experimentally the existence of the elementary nuclear particle called the meson, which had been predicted in 1935 by the Japanese physicist Yukawa Hideki.