JOHN JACOB OPPENHEIMER SANSKRIT

Oppenheimer's a bit of a pop history star for uttering the words "now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" on the 1965 documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb. Not to mention the brooding supervillain persona he seems to have naturally exuded (see e.g. clip of same quotation).

What I had not realized is he (supposedly) recalled the line (which, btw, hails from the Bhagavad Gita) from memory from the Sanskrit.

This revelation lead to the immediate discovery and half-amused perusal of James A. Hijiya's paper The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Unfortunately Hijiya mostly indulges in rampant character-building and has little time for discussions of Oppenheimer's sanskrit study per se (not that he should've). Scholarly merits or demerits notwithstanding, Hijiya at least bothers to inform me that Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit under Arthur W. Ryder.

So take-away: The director of Los Alamos read Sanskrit classics in the original.

(Choplogic's razor: Other things being equal, more off-the-wall research is superior to namby pamby usefulness.)