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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#10351

John Cockcroft

1897 - 1967 (70 years)

Sir John Douglas Cockcroft was a British physicist who shared with Ernest Walton the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951 for splitting the atomic nucleus, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power.

#10352

Oskar Klein

1894 - 1977 (83 years)

Oskar Benjamin Klein was a Swedish theoretical physicist. Oskar Klein is known for his work on string theory, in particular Kaluza–Klein theory, which is partially named after him. Biography Klein was born in Danderyd outside Stockholm, son of the chief rabbi of Stockholm, Gottlieb Klein from Humenné in Kingdom of Hungary, now Slovakia and Antonie Levy. He became a student of Svante Arrhenius at the Nobel Institute at a young age and was on the way to Jean-Baptiste Perrin in France when World War I broke out and he was drafted into the military.

#10353

Homi J. Bhabha

1909 - 1966 (57 years)

Homi Jehangir Bhabha, FNI, FASc, FRS, Hon.FRSE was an Indian nuclear physicist who is widely credited as the "father of the Indian nuclear programme". He was the founding director and professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , as well as the founding director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay which was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour. TIFR and AEET served as the cornerstone of the Indian nuclear energy and weapons programme. He was the first chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission and secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy.

#10354

Joseph Fourier

1768 - 1830 (62 years)

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.

#10355

Johannes Stark

1874 - 1957 (83 years)

Johannes Stark was a German physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields". This phenomenon is known as the Stark effect.

#10356

Robert Andrews Millikan

Robert Andrews Millikan

1868 - 1953 (85 years)

Robert Andrews Millikan was an American experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.

#10357

Igor Tamm

1895 - 1971 (76 years)

Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, for their 1934 discovery and demonstration of Cherenkov radiation. He also predicted the Quasi-particle Phonon, and in 1951, together with Andrei Sakharov, proposed the Tokamak system.

#10358

Satyendra Nath Bose

Satyendra Nath Bose

1894 - 1974 (80 years)

Satyendra Nath Bose was an Indian mathematician and physicist specializing in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954 by the Government of India.

#10359

Lord Kelvin

1824 - 1907 (83 years)

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. He was the Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, where he undertook significant research and mathematical analysis of electricity, the formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and contributed significantly to unifying physics, which was then in its infancy of development as an emerging academic discipline. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883, and served as its president from 1890 to 1895. In 1892, he beca...

#10360

Aryabhata

476 - 550 (74 years)

Aryabhata or Aryabhata I was the first of the major mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. His works include the Āryabhaṭīya and the Arya-siddhanta.

#10361

Igor Kurchatov

1903 - 1960 (57 years)

Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov , was a Soviet physicist who played a central role in organizing and directing the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. As many of his contemporaries in Russia, Kurchatov, initially educated as a naval architect, was an autodidact in nuclear physics and was brought by Soviet establishment to accelerate the feasibility of the "super bomb". Aided by effective intelligence management by Soviet agencies on American Manhattan Project, Kurchatov oversaw the quick development and testing of the first Soviet nuclear weapon, which was roughly based on the first American ...

#10362

William Rowan Hamilton

William Rowan Hamilton

1805 - 1865 (60 years)

Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA, FRAS was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, living at Dunsink Observatory.

#10363

Nikola Tesla

1856 - 1943 (87 years)

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist. He is best-known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system.

#10364

Abram Ioffe

1880 - 1960 (80 years)

Abram Fedorovich Ioffe was a prominent Soviet physicist. He received the Stalin Prize , the Lenin Prize , and the Hero of Socialist Labor . Ioffe was an expert in various areas of solid state physics and electromagnetism. He established research laboratories for radioactivity, superconductivity, and nuclear physics, many of which became independent institutes.

#10365

Wilhelm Wien

1864 - 1928 (64 years)

Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien was a German physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.

#10366

Ernst Mach

1838 - 1916 (78 years)

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the physics of shock waves. The ratio of the speed of a flow or object to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honour. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism. Through his criticism of Newton's theories of space and time, he foreshadowed Einstein's theory of relativity.

#10367

Henry Siedentopf

1872 - 1940 (68 years)

Henry Friedrich Wilhelm Siedentopf was a German physicist and pioneer of microscopy. Biography Siedentopf worked in Carl Zeiss company from 1899 to 1938. In 1907 he was nominated as the head of the microscopy department.

#10368

Ebbe Hoff

1906 - 1985 (79 years)

Ebbe Curtis Hoff was chairman of the Department of Neurological Science at the Medical College of Virginia, founding Dean, School of Graduate Studies and founding director of the Virginia Division of Substance Abuse.

#10369

Carlo Cattaneo

1911 - 1979 (68 years)

Carlo Cattàneo was an Italian academic and one of the general relativity theorists and mathematical physicists in the 1960s and 1970s. He made contributions to general relativity theory, fluid mechanics, and elasticity theory.

#10370

Isabelle Stone

1868 - 1966 (98 years)

Isabelle Stone was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society. She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States. Early life and education Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago. She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890, and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University. Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.

#10371

René Taupin

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

René Taupin was a French translator, critic, and academic who lived most of his life in the United States and is best known for heading the Romance Languages department at Hunter College. Life Taupin moved to the United States in the 1920s. Taupin taught at Haverford College and Columbia University. In the 1930s, he began teaching at Hunter College. In 1954, Taupin was appointed chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College. He remained at Hunter until 1968, when he retired. After his retirement, he returned to Paris, where he spent the last 13 years of his life. He die...

#10372

Werner Hartmann

Werner Hartmann

1912 - 1988 (76 years)

Werner Hartmann was a German physicist who introduced microelectronics into East Germany. He studied physics at the Technische Hochschule Berlin and worked at Siemens before joining Fernseh GmbH. At the end of World War II, he and his research staff were flown to the Soviet Union to work on their atomic bomb project; he was assigned to Institute G. In 1955, he arrived in the German Democratic Republic ; in the same year, he founded and became the director of the VEB Vakutronik Dresden, later VEB RFT Meßelektronik Dresden. In 1956, he completed his Habilitation at the Technische Hochschule Dresden and also became a professor for Kernphysikalische Elektronik there.

#10373

Henri Bénard

1874 - 1939 (65 years)

Henri Claude Bénard was a French physicist, best known for his research on convection in liquids that now carries his name, Bénard convection. In addition, the historical surveys of both Tokaty and von Kármán both acknowledge that Bénard studied the vortex shedding phenomenon later named the Kármán vortex street, prior to von Karman's own contributions. Bénard specialized in experimental fluid dynamics, and the use of optical methods to study it. He was a faculty member at the universities at Lyon, Bordeaux, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris.

#10374

Bunsaku Arakatsu

Bunsaku Arakatsu

1890 - 1973 (83 years)

Bunsaku Arakatsu was a Japanese physics professor in the World War II Japanese Atomic Energy Research Program of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Arakatsu was a former student of Albert Einstein. Career In 1928, Arakatsu became a professor in Taihoku Imperial University . In 1934 Arakatsu built a particle accelerator at Taihoku Imperial University in Taipei, Taiwan, and performed the first atomic nucleus collision experiment in Asia there, right after the experiment performed in Cavendish Laboratory of University of Cambridge. He discovered that each nuclear fission of a U-235 atom yields, on ave...

#10375

Georges Tiercy

1886 - 1955 (69 years)

Georges César Tiercy was a Swiss astronomer and the 7th director of the Observatoire de Genève from 1928 to 1956. Tiercy received his bachelor of science degree in 1913 from the University of Paris and his Ph.D. in science and mathematics from the University of Geneva in 1915. He was a master in a private college in Ouchy from 1908 to 1912. He taught mathematics in various schools in Geneva from 1913 to 1927 and was a privat-docent at the University of Geneva from 1915. After an internship at the observatories of Hamburg in 1927 and of Arcetri in Florence in 1927–1928, Tiercy became director of the observatory of Geneva in 1928.

#10376

Edgar Buckingham

Edgar Buckingham

1867 - 1940 (73 years)

Edgar Buckingham was an American physicist. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1887. He did graduate work at Strasbourg and then studied under the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig, from which he was granted a PhD in 1893. He worked at the USDA Bureau of Soils from 1902 to 1906 as a soil physicist. He worked at the National Bureau of Standards 1906–1937. His fields of expertise included soil physics, gas properties, acoustics, fluid mechanics, and blackbody radiation. He is also the originator of the Buckingham theorem in the field of dimensional...

#10377

Paul Couderc

1899 - 1981 (82 years)

Paul Couderc was a French academic who held mathematics professorships at lycées in Chartres and Paris . Biography Couderc completed his education at lycées in Nevers and Dijon, followed by a doctorate in mathematical sciences from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1926, he married Blanch Jurus.

#10378

Yuri Rumer

1901 - 1985 (84 years)

Yuri Borisovich Rumer was a Soviet theoretical physicist, who mostly worked in the fields of quantum mechanics and quantum optics. Known in the West as Georg Rumer, he was a close friend of Lev Landau, and was arrested with him during the Great Purge in 1938.

#10379

Alfred Perot

1863 - 1925 (62 years)

Jean-Baptiste Alfred Perot was a French physicist. Together with his colleague Charles Fabry he developed the Fabry–Pérot interferometer in 1899. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Janssen Medal for 1912. The Royal Society awarded Fabry and Perot the Rumford medal in 1918.

#10380

John Randall

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Sir John Turton Randall, was an English physicist and biophysicist, credited with radical improvement of the cavity magnetron, an essential component of centimetric wavelength radar, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It is also the key component of microwave ovens.

#10381

Walter Thompson Welford

1916 - 1990 (74 years)

Walter Thompson Welford was a British physicist with expertise in optics. Biography Welford attended Hackney Technical College, leaving at 16 to work as a technician at the London Hospital and then Oxford University Biochemistry Department. He studied mathematics privately and in 1942 obtained a first-class external degree from the University of London. After working for a time at the optical instrument manufacturer Adam Hilger Ltd., he came to Imperial College London in 1947 as a research assistant. He was appointed lecturer in 1951 and after successive promotions became a full professor of physics in 1973, retiring in 1983.

#10382

Ernst Stueckelberg

Ernst Stueckelberg

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist, regarded as one of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century. Despite making key advances in theoretical physics, including the exchange particle model of fundamental forces, causal S-matrix theory, and the renormalization group, his idiosyncratic style and publication in minor journals led to his work not being widely recognized until the mid-1990s.

#10383

Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz

Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz

1885 - 1973 (88 years)

Geertruida Luberta de Haas-Lorentz was a Dutch physicist and the first to perform fluctuational analysis of electrons as Brownian particles. Consequently she is considered to be the first woman to work in electrical noise theory.

#10384

Henk Dorgelo

1894 - 1961 (67 years)

Hendrik Berend Dorgelo was a Dutch physicist and academic. He was the first rector magnificus of the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven. Biography Henk Dorgelo originally attended teachers' training college and became a teacher. He was drafted during World War I and did his state exams while serving as an officer. Now able to attend university, he decided to study mathematics and physics at the University of Utrecht. Following his propaedeuse in 1919, he combined study, work as a teacher at the Christelijk Gymnasium Utrecht and an internship in the laboratory of Leonard Ornstein. He earned his Ph.D in physics in 1924, writing a thesis on gas discharge physics.

#10385

Franklin L. West

1885 - 1966 (81 years)

Franklin Lorenzo Richards West was an American educator and a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . West was born and raised in Ogden, Utah Territory, to Joseph A. West and Josephine Richards. He earned a B.S. from the Utah Agricultural College in 1904 and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 1911. West was a professor of physics at the Utah Agricultural College, which is today Utah State University. For 28 years he was the dean of faculty at the school.

#10386

Benjamin Jekhowsky

Benjamin Jekhowsky

1881 - 1975 (94 years)

Benjamin Jekhowsky was a Russian–French astronomer, born in Saint-Petersburg in a noble family of a Russian railroad official. After attending Moscow University, he worked at the Paris Observatory beginning in 1912. Later he worked at the Algiers Observatory , where he became known as a specialist in celestial mechanics. After 1934, he appears to have begun signing scientific articles as Benjamin de Jekhowsky. The Minor Planet Center credits his discoveries under the name "B. Jekhovsky" . In modern English transliteration, his name would be written as Zhekhovskii or Zhekhovsky.

#10387

Jakob Laub

1884 - 1962 (78 years)

Jakob Johann Laub was a physicist from Austria-Hungary, who is best known for his work with Albert Einstein in the early period of special relativity. Life He was the son of Abraham Laub and Anna Maria Schenborn. Laub, who converted from the Jewish to the Catholic faith and changed his name from "Jakub" into "Jakob Johann", first visited High School in Rzeszów. Next stations were the University of Vienna, the University of Kraków and finally the University of Göttingen, where he studied mathematics under David Hilbert, Woldemar Voigt, Walther Nernst, Karl Schwarzschild and Hermann Minkowski. Afterwards he went to the University of Würzburg, where he attained a doctorate in 1907.

#10388

Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski

Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski

1901 - 1964 (63 years)

Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski was a Polish-Austrian physicist, writer and businessman of Jewish descent. His testimony in the trial David Rousset vs. Les Lettres francaises and his book The Accused contributed significantly to spreading knowledge about Stalinist terror and show trials in Western Europe.

#10389

Mieczysław Wolfke

Mieczysław Wolfke

1883 - 1947 (64 years)

Mieczysław Wolfke was a Polish physicist, professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, the forerunner of holography and television. He discovered the method of solidification of helium as well as two types of liquid helium. He was a Masonic Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge of Poland from 1931 to 1934. He served as president of the Polish Physical Society between 1930 and 1934.

#10390

Kristian Birkeland

Kristian Birkeland

1867 - 1917 (50 years)

Kristian Olaf Bernhard Birkeland was a Norwegian scientist, professor of physics at the Royal Fredriks University in Oslo. He is best remembered for his theories of atmospheric electric currents that elucidated the nature of the aurora borealis. In order to fund his research on the aurorae, he invented the electromagnetic cannon and the Birkeland–Eyde process of fixing nitrogen from the air. Birkeland was nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times.

#10391

Georgi Manev

1884 - 1965 (81 years)

Georgi Manev was a Bulgarian physicist, founder of the Sofia University Department of Theoretical Physics, rector of Sofia University and education minister of Bulgaria . His work, mostly known as the Manev field, is used today in aerospace science.

#10392

Francis Lee Friedman

Francis Lee Friedman

1918 - 1962 (44 years)

Francis Lee Friedman was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Life Born in New York City, Friedman received a BA from Harvard in 1939 and an MA also from Harvard in 1940. In 1941 he was a graduate assistant at the University of Wisconsin.

#10393

Robert d'Escourt Atkinson

1898 - 1982 (84 years)

Robert d'Escourt Atkinson was a British astronomer, physicist and inventor. Biography Robert d'Escourt Atkinson was born in Wales on April 11, 1898. He went to Manchester Grammar School and received a degree in physics from Oxford in 1922. He worked in the Clarendon Laboratory and then went to Göttingen, where he received a Ph.D. in physics in 1928. After teaching physics at the Berlin Technische Hochscule for a year, Atkinson was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at Rutgers University. He taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey from 1929 to 1937, when he became Chief Assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory.

#10394

Paul Peter Ewald

Paul Peter Ewald

1888 - 1985 (97 years)

Paul Peter Ewald, FRS was a German crystallographer and physicist, a pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods. Education Ewald received his early education in the classics at the Gymnasium in Berlin and Potsdam, where he learned to speak Greek, French, and English, in addition to his native German.

#10395

Édmée Chandon

1885 - 1944 (59 years)

Édmée Marie Juliette Chandon was an astronomer known for being the first professional female astronomer in France. She worked at the Paris Observatory from 1908 until her retirement in 1941. Biography The eldest of five children, Chandon was born to Marie Duhan and merchant François Chandon on 21 November 1885 in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. In July 1906, she completed her degree in Mathematical Sciences at the Faculté des sciences de Paris. She began working at the Paris Observatory in November 1908 as a trainee, where she met Jacques Jean Trousset after he joined her team in January 1909.

#10396

Ruth Stokes

1890 - 1968 (78 years)

Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.

#10397

Pavel Molchanov

1893 - 1941 (48 years)

Pavel Alexandrovich Molchanov was a Soviet Russian meteorologist and the inventor of the first Russian radiosonde in 1930, while the French Pierre Idrac and Robert Bureau were the first to develop the radiosonde in 1929.

#10398

Fanny Gates

1872 - 1931 (59 years)

Fanny Cook Gates was an American physicist, an American Physical Society fellow and American Mathematical Society member. She made contributions to the research of radioactive materials, determining that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively. More specifically, Gates showed that the emission of blue light from quinine was temperature dependent, providing evidence that the emitted light is produced from phosphorescence rather than radioactive decay.

#10399

Paul Harzer

1857 - 1932 (75 years)

Paul Harzer was a German mathematician and astronomer best known for his papers arguing with Albert Einstein regarding the Sagnac effect and its relationship to Special Relativity. Harzer was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Kiel and Director of its observatory. His published article on the experiment of Franz Harress drew two reply articles from Einstein.

#10400

Samson Kutateladze

Samson Kutateladze

1914 - 1986 (72 years)

Samson Semyonovich Kutateladze was a Soviet heat physicist and hydrodynamist. Biography Early life Kutateladze's parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, Aleksandra Vladimirovna, an obstetric nurse. His father, Semyon Samsonovich, had been a nobleman; he was before the October Revolution a student at Petrograd University and then an army officer. He was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp near Novosibirsk. Following the divorce, Kutateladze and his mother lived for a few years in Georgia, returning in 1922 to Petrograd.

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