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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#9601

Fritz Houtermans

Fritz Houtermans

1903 - 1966 (63 years)

Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans was a Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and nuclear physicist and Communist born in Zoppot near Danzig , West Prussia to a Dutch father, who was a wealthy banker. He was brought up in Vienna, where he was educated, and moved to Göttingen when he was 18 to study. It was in Göttingen where he obtained his Ph.D. under James Franck.

#9602

Ilya Lifshitz

1916 - 1982 (66 years)

Ilya Mikhailovich Lifshitz was a leading Soviet theoretical physicist, brother of Evgeny Lifshitz. He is known for his works in solid-state physics, electron theory of metals, disordered systems, and the theory of polymers.

#9603

Lawrence Bragg

1890 - 1971 (81 years)

Sir William Lawrence Bragg, was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, "For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays"; an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography.

#9604

Louis de Broglie

Louis de Broglie

1892 - 1987 (95 years)

Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie was a French physicist and aristocrat who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.

#9605

John Lighton Synge

1897 - 1995 (98 years)

John Lighton Synge was an Irish mathematician and physicist, whose seven-decade career included significant periods in Ireland, Canada, and the USA. He was a prolific author and influential mentor, and is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the theory of relativity.

#9606

Lincoln LaPaz

1897 - 1985 (88 years)

Lincoln LaPaz was an American astronomer from the University of New Mexico and a pioneer in the study of meteors. Early life and education He was born in Wichita, Kansas on February 12, 1897 to Charles Melchior LaPaz and Emma Josephine . He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1920 in mathematics at Fairmont College and also taught there between 1917 and 1920. He earned his master's degree via a scholarship at Harvard University, completed in 1922. On June 18, 1922, he married Leota Ray Butler and later had two children, Leota Jean and Mary Strode. Between 1922 and 1925 he taught at Dartmouth C...

#9607

William Reginald Dean

1896 - 1973 (77 years)

William Reginald Dean was a British applied mathematician and fluid dynamicist. His research interests included Stokes flow, solid mechanics, and flow in curved channels. The Dean number bears his name.

#9608

Gregory Wannier

1911 - 1983 (72 years)

Gregory Hugh Wannier was a Swiss physicist. He developed a complete set of orthogonal functions known as the Wannier functions which became tools of the trade for solid-state theorists. He also had made contributions to ferromagnetic theory via the Ising model. The Kramers–Wannier duality yields the exact location of the critical point for the Ising model on the square lattice.

#9609

Harold K. Schilling

1899 - 1979 (80 years)

Harold K. Schilling was a professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University. He had served as chairman of the physics department and then as dean of the graduate school. He also wrote extensively about science and religion.

#9610

C. Donald Shane

1895 - 1983 (88 years)

Charles Donald Shane was an American astronomer and director of the Lick Observatory of the University of California from 1945 to 1958, during which time he carried out his monumental program of counting external galaxies and investigating their distribution.

#9611

Samuel Collins

1898 - 1984 (86 years)

Samuel Cornette Collins was an American chemist, physicist, and engineer. Collins graduated from Sumner County High School in 1916. He obtained his PhD in chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1927. He taught at Carson-Newman College, the University of Tennessee, Tennessee State Teachers College, and the University of North Carolina, and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research associate in the chemistry department in 1930. After World War II, he returned to MIT, joining the department of mechanical engineering. He was appointed professor in 1949 and retired in 1964.

#9612

Leonard I. Schiff

1915 - 1971 (56 years)

Leonard Isaac Schiff was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on March 29, 1915 and died on January 21, 1971, in Stanford, California. He was a physicist best known for his book Quantum Mechanics, originally published in 1949 .

#9613

Erich Schmid

1896 - 1983 (87 years)

Erich Schmid was a physicist from Austria. He made important discoveries in the field of crystal plasticity. Schmid studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1920 under the supervision of Felix Ehrenhaft. He then became the assistant of Ludwig Flamm. In 1951 he accepted a position at the University of Vienna and stayed there until retiring in 1967.

#9614

Jesse Francis McClendon

1880 - 1976 (96 years)

Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.

#9615

Max Delbrück

1906 - 1981 (75 years)

Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück was a German–American biophysicist who participated in launching the molecular biology research program in the late 1930s. He stimulated physical scientists' interest into biology, especially as to basic research to physically explain genes, mysterious at the time. Formed in 1945 and led by Delbrück along with Salvador Luria and Alfred Hershey, the Phage Group made substantial headway unraveling important aspects of genetics. The three shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses".

#9616

Roberts Rugh

1903 - 1978 (75 years)

Roberts Rugh, Ph.D. , radiation biologist and embryologist. Life Roberts Rugh was born to Arthur and Gertrude Rugh in Springfield, Ohio on April 16, 1903, and died on 11 November 1978 in Bethesda, Maryland. Rugh married Harriette Sheldon on July 24, 1926, and the couple had two children, Mary Elizabeth Downs and William Arthur.

#9617

Alec Merrison

1924 - 1989 (65 years)

Sir Alexander Walter Merrison FRS was a British physicist. He was a professor in experimental physics at Liverpool University and the first director of the new Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory. He later became vice-chancellor of University of Bristol.

#9618

Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski

1906 - 1982 (76 years)

Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski was a Polish chemist, physicist and mathematician. An institute in Wrocław, Poland called the Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research is named after him.

#9619

Edmund Clifton Stoner

1899 - 1968 (69 years)

Edmund Clifton Stoner FRS was a British theoretical physicist. He is principally known for his work on the origin and nature of itinerant ferromagnetism , including the collective electron theory of ferromagnetism and the Stoner criterion for ferromagnetism. Stoner made significant contributions to the electron configurations in the periodic table.

#9620

Earle K. Plyler

1897 - 1976 (79 years)

Earle Keith Plyler , was an American physicist and an important pioneer of infrared spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy. He is the namesake of the "Earle K. Plyler Prize" of the American Physical Society.

#9621

Richard von Mises

Richard von Mises

1883 - 1953 (70 years)

Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He described his work in his own words shortly before his death as:

#9622

Alfred Harrison Joy

1882 - 1973 (91 years)

Alfred Harrison Joy was an astronomer best known for his work on stellar distances, the radial motion of stars, and variable stars. A crater on the Moon has been named in his honor. Early years He was born in Greenville, Illinois, the son of F.P. Joy, a prominent clothing merchant in Greenville and one-time mayor of the town. He received a BA from Greenville College in 1903 and an MA from Oberlin College the next year.

#9623

Harish-Chandra

1923 - 1983 (60 years)

Harish-Chandra Mehrotra FRS was an Indian-American mathematician and physicist who did fundamental work in representation theory, especially harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups. Early life Harish-Chandra Mehrotra was born in Kanpur. He was educated at B.N.S.D. College, Kanpur and at the University of Allahabad. After receiving his master's degree in physics in 1940, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for further studies under Homi J. Bhabha.

#9624

Eugene Rabinowitch

1901 - 1973 (72 years)

Eugene Rabinowitch was a Russian-born American biophysicist who is known for his work in photosynthesis and nuclear energy. He was a co-author of the Franck Report and a co-founder in 1945 of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a global security and public policy magazine, which he edited until his death.

#9625

Georg von Békésy

Georg von Békésy

1899 - 1972 (73 years)

Georg von Békésy was a Hungarian-American biophysicist. By using strobe photography and silver flakes as a marker, he was able to observe that the basilar membrane moves like a surface wave when stimulated by sound. Because of the structure of the cochlea and the basilar membrane, different frequencies of sound cause the maximum amplitudes of the waves to occur at different places on the basilar membrane along the coil of the cochlea. High frequencies cause more vibration at the base of the cochlea while low frequencies create more vibration at the apex.

#9626

Frank Horton

1878 - 1957 (79 years)

Frank Horton FRS was professor of physics at Royal Holloway College, London University from 1914 to 1946 and later Vice-Chancellor of London University during the years of World War II from 1939 to 1945.

#9627

Felix Bloch

1905 - 1983 (78 years)

Felix Bloch was a Swiss-American physicist and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for "their development of new ways and methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements." In 1954–1955, he served for one year as the first director-general of CERN. Felix Bloch made fundamental theoretical contributions to the understanding of ferromagnetism and electron behavior in crystal lattices. He is also considered one of the developers of nuclear magnetic resonance.

#9628

Owen Willans Richardson

Owen Willans Richardson

1879 - 1959 (80 years)

Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's law. Biography Richardson was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England, the only son of Joshua Henry and Charlotte Maria Richardson. He was educated at Batley Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained First Class Honours in Natural Sciences. He then got a DSc from University College London in 1904.

#9629

Jesse DuMond

1892 - 1976 (84 years)

Jesse William Monroe DuMond was an American experimental physicist. He worked at the National Bureau of Standards and later at Caltech where he was involved in experimental approaches to establish accurate measurements of a number of physical constants including the mass and charge of the electron; and Planck's constant.

#9630

Karl Herzfeld

1892 - 1978 (86 years)

Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld was an Austrian-American physicist. Education Herzfeld was born in Vienna during the reign of the Habsburgs over the Austro-Hungarian Empire. "He came from a prominent, recently assimilated Jewish family." His father was a physician and ordinarius professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Vienna. His mother, Camilla née Herzog, was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and sister of the organic chemist R. O. Herzog.

#9631

Hugh Latimer Dryden

Hugh Latimer Dryden

1898 - 1965 (67 years)

Hugh Latimer Dryden was an American aeronautical scientist and civil servant. He served as NASA Deputy Administrator from August 19, 1958, until his death. Biography Early life and education Dryden was born in Pocomoke City, Maryland, the son of Samuel Isaac and Nova Hill Culver Dryden, and was named after a popular local Methodist clergyman. During the financial panic of 1907, his father lost his job and the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland.

#9632

Abdul Jabbar Abdullah

Abdul Jabbar Abdullah

1911 - 1969 (58 years)

Abdul Jabbar Abdullah Sam was an Iraqi wave theory physicist, dynamical meteorologist, and President Emeritus of the University of Baghdad. Abdullah obtained a doctorate in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946 before returning to Iraq to become an educator and researcher. After several years as the President of the University of Baghdad, Abdullah left Iraq amid a period of social unrest, and lived in the United States for the remainder of his life.

#9633

Imre Fényes

1917 - 1977 (60 years)

Imre Fényes was a Hungarian physicist who was the first to propose a stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Selected publications External links Imre Fényes biography

#9634

John Pasta

1918 - 1981 (63 years)

John Robert Pasta was an American computational physicist and computer scientist who is remembered today for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou experiment, the result of which was much discussed among physicists and researchers in the fields of dynamical systems and chaos theory, and as the head of the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1964 to 1970.

#9635

Dirk Brouwer

1902 - 1966 (64 years)

Dirk Brouwer was a Dutch-American astronomer. He received his PhD in 1927 at Leiden University under Willem de Sitter and then went to Yale University. From 1941 until 1966 he was editor of the Astronomical Journal.

#9636

Maud Worcester Makemson

1891 - 1977 (86 years)

Maud Worcester Makemson was an American astronomer, a specialist on archaeoastronomy, and director of Vassar Observatory. Early life and education Maud Lavon Worcester was born in 1891 in Center Harbor, New Hampshire. She attended Girls' Latin School in Boston. She briefly attended Radcliffe College, but left to teach school. In 1911, her family moved to Pasadena, California. She was working as a journalist in Bisbee, Arizona when she took an interest in astronomy. She returned to California and taught school while taking correspondence courses and summer classes to qualify for admission to the University of California.

#9637

James Chadwick

1891 - 1974 (83 years)

Sir James Chadwick, was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atom bomb research efforts. He was the head of the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was knighted in Britain in 1945 for his achievements in physics.

#9638

Johann Nikuradse

1894 - 1979 (85 years)

Johann Nikuradse was a Georgia-born German engineer and physicist. His brother, Alexander Nikuradse, was also a Germany-based physicist and geopolitician known for his ties with Alfred Rosenberg and for his role in saving many Georgians during World War II.

#9639

Cyrus Levinthal

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Levinthal graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from University of California, Berkeley and taught physics at the University of Michigan before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1957. In 1968 he joined Columbia University as the Chairman and from 1969 Professor of the newly established Department of Biological Sciences, where he remained until his death from lung cancer in 1990. While at MIT Levinthal made significant discoveries in molecular genetics relating to the mechanisms of DNA replication, the relationship between genes and proteins, and the nature of messenger RNA.

#9640

Ronald Wilfred Gurney

1899 - 1953 (54 years)

Ronald Wilfred Gurney was a British theoretical physicist and research pupil of William Lawrence Bragg at the Victoria University of Manchester during the 1920s and 1930s, Bristol University during the 1930s and later in the US, where he died.

#9641

Frits Zernike

1888 - 1966 (78 years)

Frits Zernike was a Dutch physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953 for his invention of the phase-contrast microscope. Early life and education Frits Zernike was born on 16 July 1888 in Amsterdam, Netherlands to Carl Friedrich August Zernike and Antje Dieperink. Both parents were teachers of mathematics, and he especially shared his father's passion for physics. He studied chemistry , mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam.

#9642

Denis Haydon

1930 - 1988 (58 years)

Denis Arthur Haydon FRS was a Professor of Membrane Biophysics at the University of Cambridge from 1980. He was educated at Dartford Grammar School and King's College London . He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975. He was also a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he was Vice-Master from 1978 to 1982.

#9643

David Adler

1935 - 1987 (52 years)

David Adler was an American physicist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. In condensed matter physics, Adler made significant contributions to the understanding of transition-metal oxides, the electronic properties of low-mobility materials, transport phenomena in amorphous materials, metal-insulator transitions, and electronic defects in amorphous semiconductors.

#9644

George Barker Jeffery

1891 - 1957 (66 years)

George Barker Jeffery FRS was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. He is probably best known to the scientifically literate public as the translator of papers by Albert Einstein, Hendrik Lorentz, and other fathers of relativity theory.

#9645

Takahiko Yamanouchi

1902 - 1986 (84 years)

was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for group theory in quantum mechanics first proposed by Yamanouchi in Japan. Yamanouchi was born in Kanagawa, graduated in physics from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1926. From 1926 to 1927 he was a research associate at the Imperial University of Tokyo. From 1927 to 1931 he was a professor at the Tokyo Higher School. He joined the faculty of the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1929 as a lecturer of engineering and became a full professor in 1942. He was a professor of physics at the University of Tokyo from 1949 to his retirement in 1963. During 1959–1961 he was the dean of the faculty of science.

#9646

Frederick Soddy

Frederick Soddy

1877 - 1956 (79 years)

Frederick Soddy FRS was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes". Soddy was a polymath who mastered chemistry, nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, finance and economics.

#9647

Eugene Feenberg

1906 - 1977 (71 years)

Eugene Feenberg was an American physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. Education In 1929, Feenberg graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in three years, first in his class; he majored in physics and mathematics. Upon the urging of one of his professors, C. P. Boner, Feenberg then went to Harvard University to study with Edwin C. Kemble for a doctorate in physics. While at Harvard, during 1930 and 1931, he also worked part-time at a Raytheon laboratory, as the Great Depression was in full swing. In 1931, Harvard awarded him a Parker Traveling Fellowship; he left for Europe in the fall of that year.

#9648

François Peeters

François M. Peeters is a Belgian physicist. Peeters obtained his doctorate at the University of Antwerp and completed postdoctoral research at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore. He subsequently returned to Belgium and joined the Antwerp faculty. In 2005, Peeters was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, which recognized him "[f]or his sustained, important contributions to theoretical solid state physics, in particular to the areas of mesoscopic superconductivity and nanostructured semiconductors." Peeters' election as a member of Academia Europaea took place in 2010. In 2020, Peeters...

#9649

Leslie H. Martin

Leslie H. Martin

1900 - 1983 (83 years)

Sir Leslie Harold Martin, was an Australian physicist. He was one of the 24 Founding Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science and had a significant influence on the structure of higher education in Australia as chairman of the Australian Universities Commission from 1959 until 1966. He was Professor of Physics at the University of Melbourne from 1945 to 1959, and Dean of the Faculty of Military Studies and Professor of Physics at the University of New South Wales at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in Canberra from 1967 to 1970. He was the Defence Scientific Adviser and chairman of ...

#9650

Edward Llewellyn-Thomas

1918 - 1984 (66 years)

Edward Llewellyn-Thomas was an English scientist, university professor and, writing as Edward Llewellyn, a science fiction author. Llewellyn-Thomas published sixty scientific articles on psychology and eye movement over the course of his life. Active in the field of pharmacology, he took interest in the ethical development of biomedical science. His Douglas Convolution science fiction series concerns the breakdown of civilization after most of a generation is born sterile as a side effect of a widely used anti-cancer medication.

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