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Willard Libby

Willard Libby, an American physical chemist, is depicted wearing glasses, a suit, and tie, with a serious expression against a dark background.

American physical chemist (1908–1980) who developed radiocarbon dating at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, working from the wartime discovery that cosmic rays produced carbon-14 in the atmosphere. The first dated artefacts were pieces of Egyptian acacia wood from tombs whose dynastic ages were already known, providing the calibration. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.

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