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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#10251

Vesto M. Slipher

Vesto M. Slipher

1875 - 1969 (94 years)

Vesto Melvin Slipher was an American astronomer who performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies. He was the first to discover that distant galaxies are redshifted, thus providing the first empirical basis for the expansion of the universe. He was also the first to relate these redshifts to velocity.

#10252

Niels Erik Nørlund

Niels Erik Nørlund

1885 - 1981 (96 years)

Niels Erik Nørlund was a Danish mathematician. His book Vorlesungen über Differenzenrechnung was the first book on complex function solutions of difference equations. His doctoral students include Georg Rasch.

#10253

François Frenkiel

1910 - 1986 (76 years)

François Naftali Frenkiel was a physicist and one of the founders of the American Institute of Physics journal Physics of Fluids in 1958. He was the editor of Physics of Fluids from its establishment until 1981.

#10254

Gaja Alaga

1924 - 1988 (64 years)

Gaja Alaga was a Croatian theoretical physicist who specialised in nuclear physics. He was born in noble family of Bunjevac origin in the village of Lemeš in northwestern Bačka in Kingdom of SHS .

#10255

Bergen Davis

1869 - 1958 (89 years)

Bergen Davis was an American physicist and a professor at Columbia University. Davis was born March 31, 1869, near Whitehouse, New Jersey, son of John Davis, a farmer, and Katherine Dilts Davis. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1896 and was awarded a master's degree by Columbia University in 1900 and a Ph.D. in 1901, after which he studied in Europe for two years on a John Tyndall Fellowship under J. J. Thomson and others.

#10256

Walter Bartky

1901 - 1958 (57 years)

Walter Bartky was an American astronomer, applied mathematician, and educator, noteworthy for his role in the Manhattan Project. Education and career Walter Bartky received his B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1923 and his Ph.D. in 1926. At the University of Chicago he was an instructor in 1926, an assistant professor of astronomy from 1927 to 1932, and an associate professor of astronomy from 1932 to 1942. At the University of Chicago he became in 1943 a professor of applied mathematics and associate dean in the Division of Physical Sciences, served from 1945 to 1955 as the dean of the...

#10257

Franz N. D. Kurie

1907 - 1972 (65 years)

Franz Newell Devereux Kurie was an American physicist who, while working at Yale in 1933, showed that the neutron was neither a dumbbell-shaped combination of proton and electron, nor an onion-shaped combination of an electron embracing the proton. Consequently, and until the discovery of the quark structure of hadrons, the neutron was assumed to be an elementary particle.

#10258

Elephter Andronikashvili

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Elephter Luarsabovich Andronikashvili was a Georgian physicist. He was a brother of Russian historian Irakly Andronikov. Biography Elephter Andronikashvili came from the noble Georgian Andronikashvili family. He graduated from Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in 1932. From 1934 to 1945 he lectured at Tbilisi State University. Starting in 1942 he worked for the Georgian Academy of Sciences Institute of Physics, and in 1951 he became the director of the Institute. In 1940-1941 and 1945-1948 he also did his Doktor Nauk degree at the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow. From 1951 he also w...

#10259

Walter Phelps Hall

1884 - 1962 (78 years)

Walter Phelps Hall was the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. He was a very popular professor among Princeton undergraduates during the first half of the 20th century. Hall received his bachelor's degree from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was known for occasionally standing on his desk while giving lectures.

#10260

Eric Mervyn Lindsay

1907 - 1974 (67 years)

Eric Mervyn Lindsay FRAS was an Irish astronomer. He was born at The Grange near Portadown, County Armagh to Richard and Susan Lindsay. He was educated in Dublin at the King's Hospital School, then attended Queen's University, Belfast where he earned his BSc in 1928 and a MSc in 1929. He later went to Harvard University and was awarded a PhD in 1934.

#10261

John Ambrose Fleming

John Ambrose Fleming

1849 - 1945 (96 years)

Sir John Ambrose Fleming FRS was an English electrical engineer and physicist who invented the first thermionic valve or vacuum tube, designed the radio transmitter with which the first transatlantic radio transmission was made, and also established the right-hand rule used in physics.

#10262

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.

#10263

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.

#10264

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...

#10265

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.

#10266

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.

#10267

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.

#10268

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.

#10269

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.

#10270

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.

#10271

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.

#10272

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.

#10273

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

#10274

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.

#10275

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.

#10276

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.

#10277

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.

#10278

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 ...

#10279

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.

#10280

Harriet Brooks

1876 - 1933 (57 years)

Harriet Brooks was the first Canadian female nuclear physicist. She is most famous for her research in radioactivity. She discovered atomic recoil, and transmutation of elements in radioactive decay. Ernest Rutherford, who guided her graduate work, regarded her as comparable to Marie Curie in the calibre of her aptitude. She was among the first persons to discover radon and to try to determine its atomic mass.

#10281

Frank Scott Hogg

Frank Scott Hogg

1904 - 1951 (47 years)

Frank Scott Hogg was a Canadian astronomer. Hogg was born in Preston, Ontario to Dr. James Scott Hogg and Ida Barberon. After earning an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, Hogg received the second doctorate in astronomy awarded at Harvard University in 1929 where he pioneered in the study of spectrophotometry of stars and of spectra of comets. His supervisor there was Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. During World War II, he developed a two-star sextant for air navigation. He was the head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Toronto and director of the David Dunlap Observatory from 1946 until his death.

#10282

Hilding Faxén

1892 - 1970 (78 years)

Olov Hilding Faxén was a Swedish physicist who was primarily active within mechanics. Faxén received his doctorate in 1921 at Uppsala University with the thesis Einwirkung der Gefässwände auf den Widerstand gegen die Bewegung einer kleinen Kugel in einer zähen Flüssigkeit . One of his contributions was to formulate Faxén's law, which is a correction to Stokes' law for the friction on spherical objects in a viscous fluid, valid in the case when the object moves close to a wall of the container. This was a problem previously treated by Carl Wilhelm Oseen and Horace Lamb , but incompletely solv...

#10283

Benjamin Miessner

1890 - 1976 (86 years)

Benjamin Franklin Miessner was an American radio engineer and inventor. He is most known for his electronic organ, electronic piano, and other musical instruments. He was the inventor of the Cat's whisker detector.

#10284

Nicolás Cabrera

1913 - 1989 (76 years)

Nicolás Cabrera , was a Spanish physicist who did important work on the theories of crystal growth and the oxidisation of metals. He was the son of another famous Spanish physicist Blas Cabrera and the father of American Physicist Blas Cabrera Navarro. He spent many years in exile during the Francoist State. He was Professor of the Department of physics in the University of Virginia, where he worked from 1952. He became known for his interests in engineering and material science. He founded the physics department and was a professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid , from 1971. He is considered to have given an impulse to the study of physics in Spain from the time of his return.

#10285

Roderick Oliver Redman

1905 - 1975 (70 years)

Roderick Oliver Redman FRS was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. Education Redman was born at Rodborough near Stroud, Gloucestershire and educated at Marling School and St John's College, Cambridge.

#10286

Paul Neményi

1895 - 1952 (57 years)

Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to fluid dynamics. In continuum mechanics, "Neményi's theorem" proves that, given any net of isothermal curves, there exists a five parameter family of plane stress systems for which these cur...

#10287

Albert Sauveur

1863 - 1939 (76 years)

Albert Sauveur was a Belgian-born American metallurgist. He founded the first metallographic laboratory in a university. Sauveur was born in Leuven, Belgium. He studied at the Athénée Royal in Brussels, then the School of Mines, Liège and graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1889. He remained in the United States thereafter, becoming a Professor of Metallurgy in 1905.

#10288

Clarence Chant

1865 - 1956 (91 years)

Clarence Augustus Chant was a Canadian astronomer and physicist. Early life and education Chant was born in Hagerman's Corners, Canada West to Christopher Chant and Elizabeth Croft. In 1882 he attended Markham High School, where he demonstrated a mathematical ability. After graduation, he attended St. Catherines Collegiate Institute and York County Model School in Toronto. He left to work as an instructor in 1884, and taught at Maxwell, Osprey Township for the following three years.

#10289

Alice Leigh-Smith

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Alice Leigh-Smith , born September 11, 1907, was a Croatian born nuclear physicist. She is best known for being the first woman in British history to receive a PhD in nuclear physics. Additionally, she is remembered for her pioneering research in cancer and for her attempts in the discovery of an elusive element, Element 85.

#10290

Egon Schweidler

Egon Schweidler

1873 - 1948 (75 years)

Egon Schweidler, was an Austrian physicist. Biography He was born in 1873 as the son of the court and Gerichtsadvokaten Emil von Schweidler born in Vienna. After studying physics and mathematics, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation "On the internal friction of mercury and some Amalgamen" . He was assistant to Franz Exner.

#10291

Leif Erland Andersson

Leif Erland Andersson

1943 - 1979 (36 years)

Leif Erland Andersson was a Swedish astronomer. Early life Andersson had been a child prodigy who won the Swedish television quiz show 10.000-kronorsfrågan twice, the first time at age 16. From his late teen years, he was also a well-known science fiction fan in Sweden, who chaired the MalCon in 1966 in Malmö and took over editing the pioneering Swedish science fiction amateur journal, the Scandinavian Amateur Press Alliance after John-Henri Holmberg left the position some time after 1964.

#10292

Paul Gruner

1869 - 1957 (88 years)

Franz Rudolf Paul Gruner was a Swiss physicist. Life He attended the gymnasium in Morges, the Free Gymnasium Bern, and passed the matura at another gymnasium in Bern. He studied at the universities of Bern, Strasbourg, and Zurich. The doctorate was awarded to him in 1893 under Heinrich Friedrich Weber in Zurich. From 1893 to 1903 he taught physics and mathematics at the Free Gymnasium Bern. In 1894 he was habilitated in physics and became Privatdozent, and in 1904 titular professor in Bern. From 1906 to 1913 he was professor extraordinarius, and eventually from 1913 to 1939 professor ordinarius for theoretical physics .

#10293

Harald Schering

1880 - 1959 (79 years)

Harald Ernst Malmsten Schering was a German physicist born in Göttingen. He is best known for his work in high voltage electricity and the Schering Bridge used in electrical engineering. Schering was the son of Ernst Schering, mathematician at the Göttingen Observatory. His mother came from a family of Swedish academics who worked with Ernst to translate works from French and Italian. Harald grew up with his two siblings in Göttingen and studied physics at the University of Göttingen. In 1903 he worked at the Geophysical Institute and obtained a Ph.D. in 1904 under Eduard Riecke with work on the Elster-Geitel dispersal apparatus.

#10294

Heinz Barwich

1911 - 1966 (55 years)

Heinz Barwich was a German nuclear physicist. He was deputy director of the Siemens Research Laboratory II in Berlin. At the close of World War II, he followed the decision of Gustav Hertz, to go to the Soviet Union for ten years to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, for which he received the Stalin Prize. He was director of the Zentralinstitut für Kernforschung at Rossendorf near Dresden. For a few years he was director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Soviet Union. In 1964 he defected to the West.

#10295

Maurice Curie

1888 - 1975 (87 years)

Maurice Curie was a French physicist and professor of physics at the Sorbonne, at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology. Biography Maurice was the son of Jacques Curie and the nephew of Pierre Curie.

#10296

Theodore Holstein

1915 - 1985 (70 years)

Theodore Holstein was an American theoretical physicist, specialized in solid-state physics and atomic physics. With Henry Primakoff in 1940 he introduced the Holstein-Primakoff transformation, of importantance for the theory of spin waves. Other significant papers included the polaron , infrared absorption of metals, a microscopic theory of the collision drag phenomenon by Brian Pippard, Bloch electrons in magnetic fields and his review on the transport properties in an electron-phonon gas. He corrected the Förster-Dexter theory of photoinduced energy transfer between molecules and found new mechanisms for energy transfer in disordered systems.

#10297

Ernest Esclangon

Ernest Esclangon

1876 - 1954 (78 years)

Ernest Benjamin Esclangon was a French astronomer and mathematician. Born in Mison, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in 1895 he started to study mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1898. Looking for some means of financial support while he completed his doctorate on quasi-periodic functions, he took a post at the Bordeaux Observatory, teaching some mathematics at the university.

#10298

Czesław Białobrzeski

Czesław Białobrzeski

1878 - 1953 (75 years)

Czesław Białobrzeski was a Polish physicist. He studied 1896–1901 at the University of Kyiv, continued 1908–1810 as a student of Paul Langevin at Collège de France, Paris. 1914 he was nominated professor at the University of Kyiv. 1919 he moved to Poland and became Head of department at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 1921 at the University of Warsaw. Since 1921 he was member of the Polish Academy of Learning, since 1952 of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He served as president of the Polish Physical Society between 1934–1938.

#10299

Wilhelm Hort

1878 - 1938 (60 years)

Wilhelm Karl Konrad Siegmund Adam Hort was a German physicist. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Jena, mechanical and electrical engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig, then completed his studies at the University of Göttingen, where he received a doctorate in physics . In 1917 he received his habilitation at the Technical University of Berlin and in 1923 obtained the title of professor.

#10300

Johanna Geertruida van Cittert-Eymers

1903 - 1988 (85 years)

Johanna Geertruida van Cittert-Eymers was a Dutch physicist, historian of science, museum director and author. Early years Johanna Geertruida Eymers was born in Velp, in the Netherlands on 19 June 1903, the only child of teacher Johan Anton Eymers and Johanna Hermina Aleida Huetinck. She graduated from secondary school with a HBS-b diploma in Arnhem in 1921 and moved to Utrecht to begin studying physics at the university there in 1923.

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