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John Clarke Slater (December 22, 1900 — July 25, 1976) was a noted American physicist and theoretical chemist.

Slater studied at the University of Rochester, earning his B.S. in 1920.He went on to receive his Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1923, then went on to study at Cambridge University and again at Harvard. In 1924, he collaborated with Niels Bohr and Hendrik Kramers on the BKS theory which served as the impetus for Werner Heisenberg's full quantum theory. In 1929, Slater gave a convenient way of expressing antisymmetric wave functions for fermions in the form of determinants. These determinantal functions are now known as Slater determinants. Slater served from 1930 to 1966 as a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, being recruited by MIT President Karl T. Compton to be head of the department as the latter attempted to re-make MIT as a full-fledged research university. Slater was MIT's first Institute Professor, having attained the rank in 1951. Upon turning the age of 65 in 1965, Slater was forced to retire owing to MIT's then mandatory retirement policy (since discontinued as per a 1986 U.S. Congressional amendment to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967). At this time, Slater went to the University of Florida where he served from 1966 to 1976 as research professor in physics and chemistry.

Slater is recognized for introducing (in 1930) exponential functions which describe atomic orbitals. The functions became known as Slater-type orbitals (STOs). He formulated rules for the values of the exponents in these functions, which he saw as nuclear charges partly shielded by electrons. Finally, Slater is also known in the solid-state physics community for his landmark 1954 paper with George Koster describing a scheme (the parametrized Tight-binding, aka SK, method) for interpolating the electronic band structure of a solid over the entire Brillouin zone by fitting to first-principles calculations carried out at high-symmetry points.

Prof. Slater can be credited for discouraging Richard Feynman from attending graduate school at MIT, suggesting that he apply elsewhere "for his own good." Despite Feynman's talents as a scientist, he had to contend with institutional anti-semitism when he was applying to graduate school; Slater's recommendations were vital for Feynman's acceptance into Princeton.

One of his doctoral students, William Shockley, was a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in solid state physics.

Slater's papers were bequeathed to the American Philosophical Society by his widow, Rose Mooney Slater, in 1980 and 1982. In August 2003, Alfred Switendick donated a collection of Quarterly Reports of the MIT Solid State and Molecular Theory Group, dating from 1951 to 1970.

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