David Bohm [1], once spoken of by Einstein as his intellectual successor [2], was born in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania in 1917. During his undergraduate days at Penn State, Bohm took long daily walks among the surrounding forests and rolling mountains to think about physics, including his nascent ideas for a four-dimensional cosmology. He learned more physics outside the classroom than inside, working independently through the problems in Whittaker and Watson and finding several errors in derivations in the textbooks of the day. His speed in completing homework assignments left ample time for walking, thinking, and reading.
Bohm had difficulty obtaining admission and funding for graduate school, possibly related to anti-Semitism in 1930's society. Luckily, Penn State offered an unrestricted scholarship to the winner of an annual mathematics contest consisting of five problems to be solved in an afternoon. Any student who successfully solved two of the 5 was generally the winner; Bohm solved four and drafted the outline for the solution of the fifth. This fellowship allowed Bohm to attend CalTech for graduate school.
After experiencing the freedom at Penn State for individual study, Bohm was disappointed by the more regimented and intensely competitive environment at CalTech, which he felt to be less conducive to creativity, an understanding of the intellectual foundations and underlying assumptions of physics, and the political idealism which characterized his life. Each night, Bohm would finish his homework in about an hour, afterwards immersing himself in physics texts. Bohm acquired the reputation of being the first student in CalTech history to solve every problem in Smythe's graduate electrodynamics course, often eliciting comments from the professor that no-one had solved a certain problem in that way before. After a few years Bohm left CalTech for Berkeley to work in the group of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Of course, Bohm is best known for the Ahanonov-Bohm effect. In later papers, Bohm referred to the effect as the ESAB effect, including Ehrenberg and Siday, who performed a very early (and either unnoticed or underappreciated) experiment on the subject.
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