Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898-1988), US physicist and Nobel laureate. Rabi was born in Austria-Hungary, but emigrated to the USA as a child. Rabi was educated in New York, where he spent most of his career at Columbia University. Rabi was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Physics. The Nobel was awarded for Rabi's resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Rabi invented this method in the 1930s. It became the basis of the magnetic resonance techniques of NMR and MRI, and has also been applied to the maser, laser and atomic clock. In the 1950s, Rabi helped found CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory.