American physicist awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society for "the development of novel and semiclassical and graphical theories which contributed to better understanding, analysis and prediction of complex electronic spectra of atoms and molecules, and high resolution rotation-vibration of symmetric polyatomic molecules." Harter was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and studied at Hiram College (AB, 1964) and the University of California, Irvine (PhD, 1967). He was appointed assistant professor of physics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, (1969-1973) and associate professor at the University of Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil (1974-1977). He was visiting fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1977-1978 and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta from 1979 to 1984, and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville since 1985. He has also been visiting fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1993. Link to Wikipedia biography Read less
Born: Sunday, July 18, 1943 — Lancaster, United States
Public sources identify William George Harter as an American physicist best known for work in molecular spectroscopy, symmetry, and the interplay between classical and quantum dynamics. He is associated with long-term faculty service in physics at the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville), where he taught and published on symmetry-based methods, group theory, and visualization of rotational–vibrational spectra. His writing emphasizes conceptual clarity, geometric intuition, and pedagogical tools that link abstract symmetry to experimentally observed spectra.
Based on publicly available academic references up to 2024, recent activity attributed to Harter centers on:
Specific, verifiable project announcements in mainstream news are limited; most visibility appears within academic channels and course materials.
As of the latest sources available to this profile, there are no widely reported mainstream news items about Harter in the past few years. Mentions primarily occur in citation indices, conference programs, and university contexts. For updates, check physics department pages, conference schedules in AMO and spectroscopy, and publisher listings for new editions or errata of his textbook.
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Note: Information above reflects public, general sources and may not capture private roles or unpublicized projects.