Bronx High School of Science

Overview

The Bronx High School of Science is the most decorated secondary school in scientific history — and, according to its own Nobel laureates, it got there largely in spite of its physics teaching. When the physicist and historian Robert P. Crease investigated the school for Physics World, he found that the laureates’ physics learning “took place mainly outside the classroom” (Physics World, 2009). Roy Glauber, who entered in the school’s very first class in 1938 and shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for quantum optics, started school when the first physics course was not taught until 1939 — and its textbook did not even mention atoms. That subject was covered by the chemistry textbook, which did not say atoms contained neutrons, despite the neutron’s 1932 discovery.

Founded in 1938 by resolution of the New York City Department of Education, Bronx Science — often called Bronx Sci or BX Sci — is a public specialized high school in the Bronx, now at 75 Bronx Science Blvd. Its founder and first principal, Dr. Morris Meister, believed that putting bright students together would, in Crease’s telling, “kindle ill-defined but valuable learning processes.” The school’s own records and the Bronx Science Alumni Foundation credit its alumni with nine Nobel Prizes, eleven Pulitzer Prizes, three Turing Awards, and more than 200 Regeneron Science Talent Search scholars (The Bronx High School of Science; Bronx Science Alumni Foundation).

The school’s most famous living graduate may be the one who wants to end the exam that admitted him. Zohran Mamdani, a 2025 New York City mayoral candidate, wrote in his own 2022 campaign questionnaire: “I graduated from Bronx Science” — and in the same document declared his support for “the abolition of the SHSAT,” saying he had “personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are, especially our specialized high schools” (Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, 2022).

Founded by resolution, moved by hand

Bronx Science began in borrowed space. The school was founded in 1938 by resolution of the Department of Education of the City of New York, with Dr. Morris Meister as its first principal, and was housed in a Gothic building at Creston Avenue and 184th Street — built in 1918 for Evander Childs High School, previously occupied by Walton High School and by an annex of DeWitt Clinton High School. It started with 150 ninth graders and 250 tenth graders; the rest of the building was used by DeWitt Clinton, and during the two-year joint occupation the two schools had separate teaching staffs and classes but shared supervision and administration (The Bronx High School of Science).

In 1946, through the efforts of Meister, the faculty, and the Parents’ Association, the school became co-educational. Meister himself left in February 1958, after twenty years as principal, to become the first president of the newly organized Bronx Community College; Dr. Alexander Taffel succeeded him. Under Taffel, the long-sought new building was completed, and on March 3, 1959, students and faculty occupied it for the first time. The school’s own history records how the library was moved: on a Friday afternoon, each student took home five library books from the old library and on Monday returned them to the new one — “solved in typical Bronx Science manner.” Taffel led the school until 1978; the principal list continues through Milton Kopelman, Vincent Galasso, Stanley Blumenstein ‘63, Valerie Reidy, Jean Donahue ‘77, and Rachel Hoyle, who has served since 2020.

A Nobel factory with no physics in its physics

The Physics World account is the most unusual thing ever written about Bronx Science, because its premise is a paradox: the school that produced more Nobel physicists than any high school on earth did not, for decades, teach physics particularly well. Leon Cooper, who shared the 1972 prize for superconductivity, recalled physics lessons as boring; it was his biology classes that enchanted him, luring him to stay late after school designing and running experiments “until they threw me out.” Melvin Schwartz, the 1988 laureate, told Crease that his classmates’ excited discussions — not his teacher — first awakened his interest in physics.

The class of 1950, the year below Schwartz, included Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg, who would share the 1979 Nobel Prize. Glashow told Crease he could not remember learning much from his introductory-physics class. At the time, the school offered only two advanced-physics courses: “radio technology,” in which students built crystal radio sets, and “automotive physics,” in which they took apart and reassembled an old aeroplane engine. Neither Glashow nor Weinberg bothered with either. Far more exciting was the science-fiction club — members clustering around lab tables to talk about physics — and afterschool trips to the used bookstores of lower Manhattan. What mattered, the laureates kept saying, was each other.

David Politzer, who shared the 2004 prize and spoke at the school’s American Physical Society ceremony, captured the school’s spirit with a 1966 transit strike that paralyzed New York for almost two weeks: in most schools attendance plummeted, but “at Bronx Science, attendance was normal. We walked, bicycled and hitchhiked to school. We wouldn’t miss it!” His classmate Russell Hulse, who shared the 1993 prize for discovering the first binary pulsar, spent his afterschool hours building antennas, including a radio telescope. On October 15, 2009, the American Physical Society formally designated Bronx Science a “historic physics site,” joining a list of nineteen landmarks that included Bell Labs, MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, and the University of Chicago site of Millikan’s oil-drop experiment (Physics World, 2009).

The school’s own alumni roll makes the scale concrete. Its Nobel list runs: Leon N. Cooper (‘47), Sheldon Glashow (‘50), Roy J. Glauber (‘41), Claudia Goldin (‘63) — economics, 2023, for research on women’s labor-force participation and gender pay gaps — Russell A. Hulse (‘66), Robert J. Lefkowitz (‘59), Hugh David Politzer (‘66), Melvin Schwartz (‘49), and Steven Weinberg (‘50). The ten Pulitzer winners named on the school’s history page include New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld (‘54), commentator William Safire (‘47), and Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten (‘68); the Alumni Foundation counts eleven. The student body that walks past the entrance mosaic each morning — a Moses-like figure representing the humanities rising over a rainbow, with Pythagoras’s theorem and a Franklin-like kite tiled beneath — is, per the Foundation, 60 percent immigrants or children of immigrants, speaks more than 60 languages at home, and is 44 percent below the poverty line, with the largest share commuting in from Queens (Bronx Science Alumni Foundation).

A graduate who would end the exam

Mamdani’s school years read like a deliberate departure from the Bronx Science archetype. Born in Kampala, Uganda, he moved to New York at seven, attended the progressive Bank Street School for Children in Manhattan, then earned admission to Bronx Science — “one of NYC’s most prestigious public schools,” as the Times of India put it — before enrolling at Bowdoin College in 2009, where he majored in Africana Studies and graduated in 2014 (Times of India, 2025). He defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary on June 24, 2025.

What makes his Bronx Science connection distinctive is what he wants to do to the school he graduated from. Asked in 2022 about addressing educational segregation, Mamdani answered: “As a graduate of Bronx Science, I have personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are, especially our specialized high schools. I support measures to integrate our public schools and fully fund our education system, including the abolition of the SHSAT.” It is a striking position — the product of the school’s selective admissions calling for the end of the selective admissions mechanism — and it is stated in his own words, not paraphrased from commentary. The school itself has no stated position on his campaign or his proposals; nothing here is claimed on its behalf (Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, 2022).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state current enrollment, student–teacher ratios, or acceptance rates; those appeared only as snippet-level or directory leads. It does not rank the school or use superlatives about its standing beyond the Alumni Foundation’s own stated counts. Mamdani’s views on the SHSAT and school integration are his own statements, quoted from his questionnaire; the school has not endorsed or responded to them, and no response is inferred. The Physics World account of the laureates’ school years is their own recollection, reported as such — it does not describe the school’s current curriculum, which the article notes had already been modernized with renovated advanced-physics labs and AP Physics C, described as tougher than most college physics courses.