Samuel Goudsmit was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. He was born on July 11, 1902, The Hague, Netherlands. Goudsmit studied physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest,  where he obtained his PhD in 1927. After receiving his PhD, Goudsmit served as a Professor at the University of Michigan between 1927 and 1946. In 1930 he co-authored a text with Linus Pauling titled The Structure of Line Spectra. During World War II he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After the war he was briefly a professor at Northwestern University and from 1948-1970 was a senior scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, chairing the Physics Department 1952-1960. He meanwhile became well known as the Editor-in-chief of the leading physics journal Physical Review, published by the American Physical Society. In July 1958 he started the journal Physical Review Letters.[6] On his retirement as editor in 1974, Goudsmit moved to the faculty of the University of Nevada in Reno, where he remained until his death four years later. Goudsmit was a recipient of the O.B.E. (1948), of the Medal of Freedom, of the Karl Taylor Compton Medal of the American Institute of Physics (1974), and of the U.S. National Medal of Science (1976) He was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Science (elected 1947), and the Netherlands Physical Society. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.