Smoot with COBE satellite. George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and one of two contestants to win the $1 million prize on "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?". He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. Currently Smoot is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and since 2010, a professor of physics at the Paris Diderot University, France. In 2003, he was awarded the Einstein Medal and the Oersted Medal in 2009.