Joseph Sweetman Ames

Joseph Sweetman Ames (July 3, 1864 – June 24, 1943) was a physicist, professor at Johns Hopkins University, provost of the university from 1926 to 1929, and university president from 1929 to 1935. He is best remembered as one of the founding members of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor of NASA) and its longtime chairman (1919–1939). NASA Ames Research Center is named after him. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1911. He was the 1935 recipient of the Langley Gold Medal from the Smithsonian Institution. Ames was also an assistant editor of The Astrophysical Journal and associate editor of the American Journal of Science; editor-in-chief of the Scientific Memoir Series; and editor of Joseph von Fraunhofer's memoirs on Prismatic and Diffractive Spectra (1898). Career Joseph Sweetman Ames was born in Manchester, Vermont on July 3, 1864. Ames was the son of George Lapham Ames and Elizabeth (Bacon) Ames and a descendant of the Ames and Bacon families of Connecticut. His family moved to Minnesota when he was a young boy and he attended the Shattuck School, where he showed a special interest in mathematics. When he arrived at Hopkins as a freshman in 1883, he began a lifelong affiliation of sixty years, with only a year's hiatus after his graduation in 1886 (the undergraduate curriculum was then three years). After traveling in Europe and attending Helmholtz's lectures at the University of Berlin, he returned to Hopkins in 1887 to study physics under Henry A. Rowland. He earned his PhD in 1890. As a graduate student, he served as a laboratory assistant and he continued to do so until promoted to associate [equivalent to assistant professor] in 1891. In 1893 he became associate professor, and Professor of Physics in 1898. Ames was elected an honorary member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1899. Upon Rowland's death in 1901, he was appointed Director of the Physics Laboratory. Ames contributed to his field by publishing four textbooks, serving on the editorial staff of the Astrophysical Journal and Harper's Scientific Monthly, delivering Northwestern University's Harris Lectures on "The Constitution of Matter", co-authoring a book, Theoretical Mechanics, and holding the office of president of the American Physical Society, of which he was a charter member.