The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#9851
John Kerr
1824 - 1907 (83 years)
John Kerr FRS was a Scottish physicist and a pioneer in the field of electro-optics. He is best known for the discovery of what is now called the Kerr effect. Life and work John Kerr was born on 17 December 1824 in Ardrossan, Scotland. He was a student in Glasgow from 1841 to 1846, and at the Theological College of the Free Church of Scotland, in Edinburgh, in 1849. Starting in 1857 he was a mathematical lecturer at the Free Church Training College in Glasgow. He died in Glasgow in 1907.
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August Beer
1825 - 1863 (38 years)
August Beer was a German physicist, chemist, and mathematician of Jewish descent. Biography Beer was born in Trier, where he studied mathematics and natural sciences. Beer was educated at the technical school and gymnasium of his native town until 1845, when he went to Bonn to study mathematics and the sciences under the mathematician and physicist Julius Plücker, whose assistant he became later. In 1848 he won the prize for his essay, "De Situ Axium Opticorum in Crystallis Biaxibus," and obtained the degree of Ph.D. Two years later he was appointed lecturer at the University of Bonn.
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Paul W. Merrill
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Paul Willard Merrill was an American astronomer whose specialty was spectroscopy. He was the first person to define S-type stars, in 1922. Career Merrill received his Ph.D. at the University of California in 1913. He spent the bulk of his career at Mount Wilson Observatory, from which he retired in 1952. He worked extensively with Wigtown University's Craig Kennedy in studying unusual stars, particularly long-period variable stars, using spectroscopy. He also studied the interstellar medium, including diffuse interstellar bands. Shortly before he retired, he succeeded in detecting technetium in the variable star R Andromedae and other red variables.
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Eberhard Zwicker
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Karl Eberhard Zwicker was a German acoustics scientist and full professor at the Technical University of Munich. Zwicker studied physics and electrical engineering at the University of Stuttgart and was an assistant of . In 1967 he was appointed full professor of the newly founded Institute for Electro-Acoustics of the Technical University of Munich.
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Jan Brożek
1585 - 1652 (67 years)
Jan Brożek was a Polish polymath: a mathematician, astronomer, physician, poet, writer, musician and rector of the Kraków Academy. Life Brożek was born in Kurzelów, Sandomierz Province, and lived in Kraków, Staszów, and Międzyrzec Podlaski.
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Bohumil Kučera
1874 - 1921 (47 years)
Bohumil Kučera was a Czech physicist. Biography Kučera studied physics at the Charles University in Prague and was the first scientist in Czech lands to examine the newly discovered effect of radioactivity. In 1912 he became professor of experimental physics at the university. He was the first to study droplets of mercury used as electrode . His work was the basis for the discovery of polarography by Jaroslav Heyrovský.
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Eilhard Wiedemann
1852 - 1928 (76 years)
Eilhard Ernst Gustav Wiedemann was a German physicist and historian of science. He was the son of physicist Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann , and an older brother to Egyptologist Alfred Wiedemann . He studied physics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig, obtaining his doctorate in 1872 with the thesis "Über die elliptische Polarisation und ihre Beziehung zu den Oberflächenfarben der Körper . From 1878 to 1886, he was an associate professor of physics at Leipzig, afterwards relocating to the University of Erlangen as a full professor .
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Zhang Yuzhe
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Zhang Yuzhe , also known as Yu-Che Chang, was a Chinese astronomer and director of the Purple Mountain Observatory who is widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese astronomy. He studied the light curves of asteroids, and thus their rotation periods. He also researched the variable star CZ Cassiopeiae and the evolution of the orbit of Comet Halley. Zhang discovered 3 comets and is credited under the name Y. C. Chang by the Minor Planet Center for the discovery of one minor planet, the outer main-belt asteroid 3789 Zhongguo.
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Robert Lyster Thornton
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Robert Lyster Thornton was a British-Canadian-American physicist who worked on the cyclotrons at Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in the 1930s. During World War II he assisted with the development of the calutron as part of the Manhattan Project. He returned to Berkeley in 1945 to lead the construction of the cyclotron, and spent the rest of his career there.
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Samuel Wesley Stratton
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Samuel Wesley Stratton was an administrator in the American government, physicist, and educator. Life and work Stratton was born on farm in Litchfield, Illinois on July 18, 1861. In his youth he kept farm machinery in repair and worked as a mechanic and carpenter. He worked his way through Illinois Industrial University at Urbana , receiving his bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering in 1884. He became an instructor in mathematics and physics following his graduation, and in 1889, when Physics department head Theodore B. Comstock, Professor of Mining Engineering and Physics, ine...
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Ernst Hartwig
1851 - 1923 (72 years)
Carl Ernst Albrecht Hartwig was a German astronomer. On 20 August 1885, Hartwig discovered a new star, SN 1885A , in the Andromeda Galaxy, which was the first supernova that was ever seen that was outside the Milky Way. He is also credited for the discovery and co-discovery of three parabolic and hyperbolic cometss, namely C/1879 Q2, C/1880 S1 and C/1886 T1. In 1882, Hartwig observed the transit of Venus in Argentina. During the 1883 observation campaign of comet 6P/d'Arrest he found five NGC objects working at the Strasbourg Observatory. In 1874 he became assistant at the Observatory of Stra...
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Robert T. A. Innes
1861 - 1933 (72 years)
Robert Thorburn Ayton Innes FRSE FRAS was a British-born South African astronomer best known for discovering Proxima Centauri in 1915, and numerous binary stars. He was also the first astronomer to have seen the Great January Comet of 1910, on 12 January. He was the founding director of a meteorological observatory in Johannesburg, which was later converted to an astronomical observatory and renamed to Union Observatory. He was the first Union Astronomer. Innes House, designed by Herbert Baker, built as his residence at the observatory, today houses the South African Institute of Electrical E...
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Francesco Bianchini
1662 - 1729 (67 years)
Francesco Bianchini was an Italian philosopher and scientist. He worked for the curia of three popes, including being camiere d'honore of Clement XI, and secretary of the commission for the reform of the calendar, working on the method to calculate the astronomically correct date for Easter in a given year.
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G. M. B. Dobson
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
Gordon Miller Bourne Dobson was a British physicist and meteorologist who did important work on ozone. Education He was educated at Sedbergh School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a first in Natural Sciences in 1909. He was later awarded DSc .
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Ishak Efendi
1774 - 1835 (61 years)
Hoca Ishak Efendi was an Ottoman mathematician and engineer. Life Ishak Efendi was born in Arta , probably in 1774, to a Jewish family. His father had converted to Islam. After his father died, he went to Constantinople, where he studied mathematics and foreign languages, learning French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew alongside Turkish, Arabic and Persian.
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Egil Hylleraas
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Egil Andersen Hylleraas was a Norwegian theoretical physicist known for creating a method for predicting the ground state energy of two-electron atoms and trial wave functions for many-electron atoms.
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Jonas Moore
1627 - 1679 (52 years)
Sir Jonas Moore, FRS was an English mathematician, surveyor, ordnance officer, and patron of astronomy. He took part in two of the most ambitious English civil engineering projects of the 17th century: draining the Great Level of the Fens and building the Mole at Tangier. In later life, his wealth and influence as Surveyor-General of the Ordnance enabled him to become a patron and driving force behind the establishment of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
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Richard Kleeman
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Richard Daniel Kleeman was an Australian physicist. With William Henry Bragg he discovered that the alpha particles emitted from particular radioactive substances always had the same energy, providing a new way of identifying and classifying them.
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Elda Emma Anderson
1899 - 1961 (62 years)
Elda Emma Anderson was an American physicist and health researcher. During World War II, she worked on the Manhattan Project at Princeton University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she prepared the first sample of pure uranium-235 at the laboratory. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, she became professor of physics at Milwaukee-Downer College in 1929. After the war, she became interested in health physics. She worked in the Health Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and established the professional certification agency known as the American Board of H...
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Mu'ayyad al-Din al-Urdi
1200 - 1266 (66 years)
Al-Urdi was a medieval Syrian Arab astronomer and geometer. Born circa 1200, presumably in the village of ʿUrḍ in the Syrian desert between Palmyra and Resafa, he came to Damascus at some point before 1239, where he worked as an engineer and teacher of geometry, and built instruments for al-Malik al-Mansur of Hims. In 1259 he moved to Maragha in northwestern Iran, after being asked by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi to help establish the Maragha observatory under the patronage of Hulagu. Al-Urdi's most notable works are Risālat al-Raṣd, a treatise on observational instruments, and Kitāb al-Hayʾa , a work on theoretical astronomy.
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Albert Brudzewski
1445 - 1497 (52 years)
Albert Brudzewski, also Albert Blar , Albert of Brudzewo or Wojciech Brudzewski was a Polish astronomer, mathematician, philosopher and diplomat. Life Albert , who would sign himself "de Brudzewo" , was born about 1445, in Brudzewo, near Kalisz. Scant information exists about his early life. It is only known that as a 23-year-old he matriculated at the Kraków Academy , where he remained through nearly all his life, teaching there for two decades. He served as the academy's dean, as procurator , and as head of the Bursa Hungarorum .
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Johan Wilcke
1732 - 1796 (64 years)
Johan Carl Wilcke was a Swedish physicist. Biography Wilcke was born in Wismar, son of a clergyman who in 1739 was appointed second pastor of the German Church in Stockholm. He went to the German school in Stockholm and enrolled at the University of Uppsala in 1749. He spent the years from 1751 travelling abroad and received the magister degree from the University of Rostock in 1757, after having published the dissertation De electricitatibus contrariis. In 1759 he became the first "Thamian lecturer" of experimental physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a position created through a donation from the wealthy merchant Sebastian Tham, and a member of the academy.
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DeWitt Bristol Brace
1859 - 1905 (46 years)
DeWitt Bristol Brace was an American physicist who was known for his optical experiments, especially as regards the relative motion of Earth and the luminiferous aether. Life and work Brace was born in Wilson, New York, prepared for his studies in Lockport and graduated in 1881 at the Boston University. Afterwards he spent two years at the Johns Hopkins University with Henry Augustus Rowland, and two years at the University of Berlin under Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff, where he graduated in 1885. From 1887 to 1888 he was assistant professor at the University of Michigan and from 1888 to 1905 Professor of Physics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
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Hartmut Kallmann
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Harmut Kallmann was a German physicist. He is known for his work on the scintillation counter for the detection of gamma rays. Biography - Career Kallmann was born in Berlin in a Jewish family. He studied at the University of Göttingen and wrote his dissertation under Max Planck, completing it in 1920. After this he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. As a post-doctoral researcher he worked with Fritz Haber and Fritz London. In 1933 he was dismissed from the institute due to his non-Aryan Jewish descent. The companies IG Farben and AEG provide...
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Fred Allison
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Fred C. Allison was an American physicist. He developed a magneto-optic spectroscopy method that became known as the Allison magneto-optic method. He claimed to have discovered two new elements using this method. He taught at the Auburn University Physics Department for more than thirty years.
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Viktor Trkal
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Viktor Trkal was a Czech physicist and mathematician who specialized in theoretical quantum physics. Life and work Trkal went to the Gymnasium in Vysoké Mýto where his teacher was Adolf Pařízek . From 1906 to 1910 he studied mathematics and physics in Prague. His mathematics professors were Karel Petr , Jan Sobotka and then beginning Bohumil Bydžovský . He attended physics lectures by Čeněk Strouhal , Bohumil Kučera , František Koláček and František Záviška . He obtained his doctorate in 1911 with a thesis on the Problem of Dirichlet and Neumann with integral equations. Then he did his one-year military service and afterwards taught at a business school in Prague in 1912-1914.
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Georg Simon Klügel
1739 - 1812 (73 years)
Georg Simon Klügel was a German mathematician and physicist. He was born in Hamburg, and in 1760 went to the University of Göttingen where he initially studied theology before switching to mathematics. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a fellow student. His doctoral thesis Conatuum praecipuorum theoriam parallelarum demonstrandi recensio, published in 1763 with Abraham Gotthelf Kästner as doctoral advisor, was a study of 30 attempted proofs of the parallel postulate. It was influential at the time and much cited.
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Alexander Stewart Herschel
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Alexander Stewart Herschel, DCL, FRS was a British astronomer. Although much less well known than his grandfather William Herschel or his father John Herschel, he did pioneering work in meteor spectroscopy. He also worked on identifying comets as the source of meteor showers. The Herschel graph, the smallest non-Hamiltonian polyhedral graph, is named after Herschel due to his pioneering work on Hamilton's Icosian game.
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Giovanni Battista Guglielmini
1763 - 1817 (54 years)
Giovanni Battista Guglielmini was an Italian physicist. Guglielmini's experiments take place in the list of experiments by scientists to demonstrate the Earth's rotation experimentally. Life Guglielmini was born at Bologna, received the tonsure in early youth and was a secular priest . His career in the Church is unknown; he died single. A protégé of Cardinal Ignazio Boncompagni, he pursued higher studies, and graduated in philosophy, in 1787, at the age of 24. If he was a relative of the famous engineer and physician, Domenico Guglielmini, who had been general superintendent of the Bologna...
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Hermann Kobold
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Hermann Kobold was a German astronomer. Biography Hermann Albert Kobold was born in Hanover, Kingdom of Hanover, the third of five children of the carpenter August Kobold and his wife Dorothea Kobold . From 1877 to 1880, he studied mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Göttingen and attained a doctorate in astronomy in July 1880 with Wilhelm Klinkerfues as his adviser.
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Abraham Zacuto
1450 - 1521 (71 years)
Abraham Zacuto was a Castilian astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, rabbi and historian who served as Royal Astronomer to King John II of Portugal. His astrolabe of copper, his astronomical tables and maritime charts played an important role in the Spanish and Portuguese navigation capability. They were used by Vasco Da Gama and Christopher Columbus.
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William Wallace
1768 - 1843 (75 years)
William Wallace LLD was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer who invented the eidograph . Life Wallace was born at Dysart in Fife, the son of Alexander Wallace, a leather manufacturer, and his wife, Janet Simson. He received his school education in Dysart and Kirkcaldy.
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Alexandre Guy Pingré
1711 - 1796 (85 years)
Dom Alexandre Guy Pingré was a French canon regular, astronomer and naval geographer. Early life Pingré was born in Paris but was educated by the canons regular of the Abbey of St. Vincent in Senlis, Oise, where he entered the community at the age of sixteen. In 1735, after his ordination as a priest, he was appointed professor of theology at the school. He soon, however, came under suspicion of subscribing to Jansenism and was summoned by the Bishop of Pamiers, by whom he was rebuked and required to submit to an interrogation by a committee of Jesuits.
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Eduard Mahler
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Eduard Mahler was a Hungarian-Austrian astronomer, Orientalist, and natural scientist. He graduated from a Vienna public school in 1876 and then studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna, receiving his degree in 1880. From November 1, 1882 until the death of Theodor von Oppolzer in December, 1886, Mahler participated in Oppolzer's research. On June 1, 1885, he was an appointed an assistant in the royal Austrian Institute of Weights and Measures.
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Stefano Freguia
#9886
Franz Josef Gerstner
1756 - 1832 (76 years)
Franz Josef Gerstner was a German-Bohemian physicist, astronomer and engineer. Life Gerstner was born in Komotau in Bohemia then part of the Habsburg monarchy. . He was the son of Florian Gerstner and Maria Elisabeth, born Englert. He studied at the Jesuits gymnasium in Komotau. After that he studied mathematics and astronomy at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague between 1772 and 1777. In 1781 he started to study medicine at the University of Vienna, but later decided to quit his studies. Instead, he worked as an assistant at the astronomical observatory in Vienna under supervision of Maximilian Hell.
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Olof Hiorter
1696 - 1750 (54 years)
Olof Petrus Hiorter was a Swedish astronomer. After studying in the Netherlands, he was appointed lecturer at the University of Uppsala in 1732 to fill the vacant position of Anders Celsius then on his grand tour of European observatories. From 1737 onwards, he studied together with Celsius the aurora phenomenon and a number of astronomy subjects . Hiorter was the first to connect the aurora to magnetic disturbances. Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin was his pupil.
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Henry Crew
1859 - 1953 (94 years)
Henry Crew was an American physicist and astronomer. Born in Richmond, Ohio, the son of William H. Crew and Deborah Ann, he attended high school in Wilmington, Ohio then matriculated to Princeton University in 1878. He graduated with an A.B. in physics 1882 and was awarded a graduate fellowship at the university for a year, which he spent at the Princeton laboratory. In 1883 he traveled for a semester overseas to study physics in Berlin, returning in 1884 to attend graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University. Three years later he was awarded a Ph.D. in physics with a thesis on "Doppler De...
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Gunther K. Wertheim
#9890
Nicolaas Hartsoeker
1656 - 1725 (69 years)
Nicolaas Hartsoeker was a Dutch mathematician and physicist who invented the screw-barrel simple microscope . Biography He was the son of Anna van der Meij and Christiaan Hartsoeker , a Remonstrant minister in Moordrecht near Gouda. His father took the family to Alkmaar in 1661 and finally to Rotterdam in 1669. Nicolaas started to make a living as a lens maker in Rotterdam, and was instructed in optics by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. In 1674, he and a fellow student, assisted by Van Leeuwenhoek, were the first to observe semen, a situation that would later lead to a priority dispute between Hart...
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Pierre Puiseux
1855 - 1928 (73 years)
Pierre Henri Puiseux was a French astronomer. Born in Paris, son of Victor Puiseux, he was educated at the École Normale Supérieure before starting work as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory in 1885.
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Julius Wilhelm Gintl
1804 - 1883 (79 years)
Julius Wilhelm Gintl was an Austrian physicist. Biography Gintl was born in 1804 in Prague and attended university in his hometown. He was chair of physics at Vienna University and later at Gratz. In 1847, the Austrian government commissioned him to manage the introduction of the electrical telegraph.
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Mahesh Chandra Nyayratna Bhattacharyya
1836 - 1906 (70 years)
Mahamahopadhyay Pandit Mahesh Chandra Nyayratna Bhattacharyya was an Indian scholar of Sanskrit, and the principal of the Sanskrit College between 1876 and 1895. A friend and colleague of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, he played an important role in the Bengal Renaissance. He was one of the most eminent Bengalis in Kolkata of the nineteenth century.
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Friedrich Kottler
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Friedrich Kottler was an Austrian theoretical physicist. He was a Privatdozent before he got a professorship in 1923 at the University of Vienna. Life In 1938, after the Anschluss, he lost his professorship due to his Jewish ancestry. With the help of Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, he immigrated to America from his hometown of Vienna, Austria, settling in Rochester, New York, where he worked at the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory. He died in Rochester, New York in 1965. Besides optics, Kottler's professional pursuits focused on the theory of relativity.
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Johann Samuel Traugott Gehler
1751 - 1795 (44 years)
Johann Samuel Traugott Gehler was a German lawyer and physicist. He studied mathematics, natural sciences and law at the University of Leipzig, obtaining his habilitation for mathematics in 1776 and his law degree the following year. While a student, his influences included physicist Johann Heinrich Winckler. In 1783 he became a city councilman in Leipzig, and from 1786 served as an associate at the Oberhofgericht Leipzig. He is best remembered as the author of a popular dictionary of physical sciences, Physikalisches Wörterbuch, published from 1787 in six volumes. Decades later, the diction...
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Katherine Clerk Maxwell
1824 - 1886 (62 years)
Katherine Mary Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physical scientist best known for her observations which supported and contributed to the discoveries of her husband, James Clerk Maxwell. Most notable of these are her involvement with his colour vision and viscosity of gases experiments. She was born Katherine Dewar in 1824 in Glasgow and married Clerk Maxwell in 1858.
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Alexander McAulay
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
Alexander McAulay was the first professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania. He was also a proponent of dual quaternions, which he termed "octonions" or "Clifford biquaternions".
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William Hussey
1862 - 1926 (64 years)
William Joseph Hussey was an American astronomer. Early life and education He was born at Mendon, Ohio, August 10, 1862, son of John Milton Hussey and Mary Catherine Stevens. He attended the Valparaiso Normal School in 1880 and completed the scientific curriculum with a specialization in education in one year. Afterward, he attended the University of Michigan to study civil engineering.
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Rudolf Ferdinand Spitaler
1859 - 1946 (87 years)
Rudolf Ferdinand Spitaler was an Austrian astronomer, geophysicist, meteorologist and climatologist. He discovered 64 IC objects whilst working at Vienna Observatory and Comet 113P/Spitaler. He was one of the first to speculate the existence of a 13th zodiacal constellation, which later became known as Ophiuchus.
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Thomas J. Parmley
1897 - 1997 (100 years)
Thomas Jennison Parmley was an American physics professor at the University of Utah. He served as chairman of the UofU's physics department from 1957 to 1963. Parmley was born in Scofield, Utah to William and Mary Veal Parmley. His father was killed in the Scofield Mine disaster in that town in 1900. In 1921, he received his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah where he was a founding member of the Sigma Pi fraternity chapter. While still being an undergraduate, he worked as a chemist for the U.S. Smeltering Company. In 1923 he married LaVern W. Parmley who served as general president of the Primary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints .
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