Samuel Goudsmit is best known in the world of physics for discovering, with George Uhlenbeck, that the electron possesses spin. He deserves equal credit for founding Physical Review Letters (PRL). Sam, as he was known to all, was born in Holland in 1902 and became a student of Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden. In 1928 he and Uhlenbeck made their great discovery. Sam joined the physics department at the University of Michigan, where he pursued atomic and nuclear theory and then spent the war years working on radar. When peace returned, he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory, and in 1952 he became the editor of Physical Review. He created PRL in 1958 and served as its editor until 1974, when he retired. 1 Sam died in 1978. An obituary by Maurice Goldhaber appeared in Physics Today, April 1979, page 71.
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