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George Edward Pake
George Pake (April 1, 1924 – March 4, 2004) was a physicist best known for helping to found Xerox PARC.
Pake grew up in Kent, Ohio and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1945. His doctorate in physics (completed in 1948) was done at Harvard under the direction of Edward Purcell. He was Purcell's second graduate student. The first was Nicolaas Bloembergen, and the third was Charles Slichter.
Pake arrived at Harvard in 1946 at the same time as Nicolaas Bloembergen. Both were set to work on NMR, discovered in December 1945 by Purcell, Robert Pound, and Henry Torrey. Their labs were next to each other in the basement of Lyman Lab, and they spoke through a hole in the wall. Bloembergen was focused primarily on proton NMR in water and other liquids; Pake was focused on proton NMR in water molecules trapped in a solid. In particular, he worked on the resonance of water of hydration in a single gypsum crystal.
After graduation, Pake went to Washington University in St. Louis, where he set up a research program in NMR and wrote up his notes on the subject, which became the textbook for NMR (published in 1950 by the American Journal of Physics). In 1951, at age 27, he was made chair of the Physics Department.
In 1954-1955, Pake went to Stanford as a visiting professor and was offered a permanent position in 1956, becoming a colleague of Felix Bloch there.
In 1962, he returned to Washington University as provost and executive vice chancellor. After other important stints (such as serving on Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's President's Science Advisory Committee) Pake left academia in 1970 to head a new laboratory at Xerox--the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
He retired in 1986 from Xerox, but remained active in the physics community.