Kai Bird

Robert decorated his room with an oriental rug, oil paintings and etchings he brought from home, and insisted on making tea from a charcoal-fired Russian samovar.

Born was a brilliant theoretical physicist, but because he sometimes made small mistakes in his long calculations, he often asked a graduate student to recheck his math. On one occasion, Born recalled, he gave a set of calculations to Oppenheimer. After a few days, Robert returned and said, “I couldn’t find any mistake—did you really do this alone?”

Contemptuous of authority and armed with a dangerous wit, Houtermans liked to tell his gentile friends, “When your ancestors were still living in the trees, mine were already forging checks!” As a teenager growing up in Vienna, he had been expelled from his gymnasium (high school) for publicly reading the Communist Manifesto on May Day.