Explore America and discover people, places, art, and history that connect to South Dakota in the Smithsonian’s collections. South Dakota’s beautiful natural landscapes include the Black Hills and the Badlands. The Great Plains cover two-thirds of the state. It is also home to two massive memorials: Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial.
Notable South Dakotans include Ernest O. Lawrence (1901–1958), born in Canton, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron—a type of particle accelerator. Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) was born in Flandreau. He had a critical role in developing the IBM’s System/360 series in the early 1960s. It was the most successful line of mainframe computers in the company’s history, and it influenced computer design for many years.
