Hartland Snyder

Hartland Sweet Snyder (1913 – May 22, 1962) was an American physicist. He is known for the Oppenheimer–Snyder model that showed how large stars would collapse to form black holes. The Courant–Snyder parameters and the principles of strong focusing are associated with him.

Life and career Snyder was born in Salt Lake City.

Snyder died May 22, 1962 after a heart attack. They modeled the gravitational collapse of a pressure-free homogeneous fluid sphere and found that it would be unable to communicate with the rest of the universe. Historian of physics David C. Cassidy assessed that this prediction of black holes might have won a Nobel Prize in Physics had the authors been alive in the 1990s when evidence was available.

Some publications Snyder authored together with Ernest Courant laid the foundations for the field of accelerator physics. In particular, Snyder with Courant and Milton Stanley Livingston developed the principle of strong focusing that made modern particle accelerators possible. The Courant–Snyder parameters, a method of characterizing the distribution of particles in a beam, were an important part of that contribution.

In popular media The discovery of the Oppenheimer–Snyder mechanism was depicted in the 2023 movie Oppenheimer, where Snyder was portrayed by actor Rory Keane.