Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Archibald Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist born on the 9th of July, 1911, in Jacksonville, Florida. He is best known for popularizing the term "black hole," coining the terms "wormhole," "quantum foam," and "it from bit," and for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Stephen Hawking called him the "hero of the black hole story."
Wheeler joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago in January 1942. He predicted that fission products could poison the nuclear chain reaction and correctly identified xenon-135, with a neutron capture cross-section of over two million barns, as the cause of the B Reactor's unexpected shutdown at Hanford. He also gave the neutron moderator its name, replacing Enrico Fermi's term "slower downer."
Wheeler used the term "black hole" in a 1967 talk at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, after an audience member grew tired of hearing his phrase "gravitationally completely collapsed object." He used it again the same year in a lecture for the American Association for the Advancement of Science titled "Our Universe, Known and Unknown." The term had appeared earlier in the decade but Wheeler's usage popularized it.
In 1990, Wheeler proposed that physics at its smallest scale is binary and that all physical reality derives from answers to yes-or-no questions. He called this "it from bit," arguing that every particle, field, and even space-time itself has an immaterial, information-theoretic origin. The idea has since become a central concept in physics.
Wheeler supervised 46 PhD students at Princeton University, more than any other physics professor there. His students included Nobel laureates Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne, as well as Jacob Bekenstein, Hugh Everett, William Unruh, and others who became prominent physicists.
Project Matterhorn was a branch office of Los Alamos Laboratory that Wheeler established at Princeton in 1951. It had two divisions: Matterhorn S, which studied nuclear fusion as a power source under Lyman Spitzer, and Matterhorn B, which did hydrogen bomb research under Wheeler. Matterhorn B's work contributed to the Ivy Mike test on the 1st of November, 1952, at Enewetak Atoll, which yielded 10.4 megatons of TNT. Matterhorn S endures today as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.