Martin Schwarzschild was a German-born American astrophysicist. He was the son of famed German physicist Karl Schwarzschild and the nephew of the Swiss astrophysicist Robert Emden. He was born on May 31, 1912 in Potsdam, Germany. In the 1950s and ’60s he headed the Stratoscope projects, which took instrumented balloons to unprecedented heights. The first Stratoscope produced high resolution images of solar granules and sunspots, confirming the existence of convection in the solar atmosphere, and the second obtained infrared spectra of planets, red giant stars, and the nuclei of galaxies. In his later years he made significant contributions toward understanding the dynamics of elliptical galaxies. Schwarzschild was renowned as a teacher and held major leadership positions in several scientific societies. Schwarzschild was the recipient of many awards and honors. He was Russell Prize Lecturer of the American Astronomical Society for 1960, and received the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1965) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1969). He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1996, and was a posthumous recipient of the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1997.