Hans Bethe was born on 2 July 1906 in Strasbourg, then part of the German Empire. He grew up in an academically oriented family and showed early promise in mathematics and physics. Bethe studied at the University of Frankfurt and later at Munich, where he completed his PhD in theoretical physics under the renowned Arnold Sommerfeld in 1928.

In the early 1930s, Bethe held teaching and research positions in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Cambridge, and Rome. His career in Germany was abruptly disrupted in 1933, when the rise of the Nazi regime forced him out of his post at the University of Tübingen due to his mother’s Jewish heritage. He emigrated first to England and then to the United States, where he eventually joined Cornell University, becoming a central figure in American physics.

Bethe made pivotal contributions across quantum mechanics, solid‑state physics, and nuclear physics. His most celebrated scientific achievement was explaining how stars produce energy, through nuclear fusion processes now known as the Bethe–Weizsäcker cycle, work that earned him the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. During World War II, he played a major role in the Manhattan Project, leading the theoretical division at Los Alamos and contributing to the development of the first atomic bombs.