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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#10451

Eugene Gardner

1901 - 1986 (85 years)

Milton Eugene Gardner was an American physicist who worked on radar systems at the Radiation Laboratory in Massachusetts. Early life He was born in Santa Cruz, California, but would have been born in China if his father, a missionary under the American Board of Missions, had not returned temporarily to the United States for safety during the Boxer Rebellion.

#10452

Daniel Frost Comstock

Daniel Frost Comstock

1883 - 1970 (87 years)

Daniel Frost Comstock was an American physicist and engineer. Biography Comstock attained a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904. He also studied in Berlin, Zürich, and Basel, where he attained his Ph.D. in 1906. At the University of Cambridge he studied under J. J. Thomson. Beginning in 1904 he was a member of the faculty at MIT in theoretical physics .

#10453

Isaak Kikoin

1908 - 1984 (76 years)

Isaak Konstantinovich Kikoin , , was a Soviet physicist of Lithuanian origin and an author of physics textbooks in Russian language who played an important role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.

#10454

Harold Loukes

1912 - 1980 (68 years)

Harold Loukes was a British academic in India and at the University of Oxford. Loukes was born in Ecclesall, Sheffield, Yorkshire. He was educated at the Central Secondary School in Sheffield before studying English at Jesus College, Oxford. He obtained a first-class degree in 1934 and then spent 10 years teaching at the University of Delhi and at the New School in Darjeeling, where he was headmaster. In 1945, he returned to Britain, teaching for four years before being appointed a lecturer in the Department of Education of the University of Oxford. In 1951, he was promoted to Reader in Education; he spent a total of 30 years in the department.

#10455

Carlotta Maury

1874 - 1938 (64 years)

Carlotta Joaquina Maury was a geologist, stratigrapher, paleontologist, and was one of the first women to work as a professional scientist in the oil and gas industry. She worked as a palaeontologist within an oil company; she was a petroleum geologist at Royal Dutch Shell. Maury focused on Tertiary mollusks. Maury initially taught in universities after attending Cornell University finishing with a PhD in 1902, although she had trouble achieving a full-time position. However, she really wanted to pursue paleontological expeditions. Even though she went on to later be successful, there were still elements of difficulty in her early career, in some ways due to her gender.

#10456

C. E. S. Phillips

1871 - 1945 (74 years)

Major Charles Edmund Stanley Phillips OBE FIP FRSE was a 20th-century British physicist and radiologist. He was also a gifted amateur artist. One of the founders of the Institute of Physics in 1920, the Phillips Award is named in his honour.

#10457

Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Lorentz

1853 - 1928 (75 years)

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He derived the Lorentz transformation of the special theory of relativity, as well as the Lorentz force, which describes the combined electric and magnetic forces acting on a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. Lorentz was also responsible for the Lorentz oscillator model, a classical model used to describe the anomalous dispersion observed in dielectric materials when the driving frequency of the electric fiel...

#10458

Hugo Stintzing

1888 - 1970 (82 years)

Hugo Stintzing was a German university lecturer in physics at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. He was involved in early research on the electron scanning microscope, studied radioactive elements and developed a model for the periodic table. He was the Director of the Institute of X-Ray Physics and Technology at Darmstadt from 1936 to 1945. He was removed from his position due to his involvement in the National Socialist German Workers' Party , and was interned in 1946.

#10459

Pieter Oosterhoff

Pieter Oosterhoff

1904 - 1978 (74 years)

Pieter Theodorus Oosterhoff was a Dutch astronomer. He was the co-administrator, along with Jan Oort, of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. His published papers are primarily in regard to variable stars and photometry. He is most noted for his 1939 observation that there appear to be two populations of globular clusters based on the periodicities of their RR Lyrae variable stars. These two populations would come to be known as Oosterhoff groups after him.

#10460

Eizaburo Nishibori

1903 - 1990 (87 years)

Eizaburo Nishibori was a Japanese scientist, alpinist and technologist. He is also known as the captain of the primary Japanese Antarctica wintering party. Nishibori was born in Kyoto in 1903. In May 1928, he graduated from the Faculty of Science, Kyoto Imperial University, and stayed on as a lecturer. In 1936, he received his graduate degree.

#10461

Vladimir Prokofiev

1898 - 1993 (95 years)

Vladimir Konstantinovich Prokofiev USSR scientist, PhD, specialist in Optics and Spectroscopy, USSR State Prize winner. Vladimir Prokofiev graduated Mikhailovsky Artillery School in 1917 and Saint Petersburg State University in 1924. He was a student of Russian academician Dmirtiy Rozhdestvenskiy.

#10462

Jean Mascart

1872 - 1935 (63 years)

Jean Mascart was a French astronomer and mathematician. Career Mascart was on the staff of the Paris observatory. On 17 May 1910, Mascart was at Tenerife to observe Halley's Comet from the southern flank of Pico de Teide.

#10463

Trevor Kincaid

1872 - 1970 (98 years)

Trevor Kincaid was a Canadian-American scientist and professor at the University of Washington who achieved national acclaim for his scientific achievements while an undergraduate student. Kincaid's interests ranged from insect life to marine biology to mollusks, though he once described himself as an "omniologist" . He is best known for introducing the gypsy moth parasite to the United States, for helping establish the Washington state oyster industry, and as the driving force behind the creation of the Friday Harbor Laboratories. Kincaid is responsible for the identification and naming of hundreds of species; at least 47 plant and animal species were, in turn, named after him.

#10464

Grigory Landsberg

Grigory Landsberg

1890 - 1957 (67 years)

Grigory Samuilovich Landsberg was a Soviet physicist who worked in the fields of optics and spectroscopy. Together with Leonid Mandelstam he co-discovered inelastic combinational scattering of light, which is known as Raman scattering.

#10465

August Herman Pfund

1879 - 1949 (70 years)

August Herman Pfund was an American physicist, spectroscopist, and inventor. Early life Pfund was born in Madison, Wisconsin and attended Wisconsin public schools until his entry into the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he earned a B.S. degree in physics and studied under Robert W. Wood.

#10466

Carl Otto von Eicken

Carl Otto von Eicken

1873 - 1960 (87 years)

Carl Otto von Eicken was a German otorhinolaryngologist. Biography He studied medicine at the universities of Kiel, Geneva, Munich, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he served as an assistant to surgeon Vincenz Czerny. He received his habilitation for laryngo-rhinology and otology at the University of Freiburg, and in 1911 became a full professor at the University of Giessen, where subsequently, he was named head of the newly constructed ear, nose, and throat clinic. In 1920/21 he served as university rector. In 1922 he succeeded Gustav Killian at the University of Berlin, where he maintained ...

#10467

Maria Pogonowska

1897 - 2009 (112 years)

Maria Pogonowska was a Polish-Israeli scientist of Jewish origin. She was a doctor of physics. Biography Maria Asterblum was born in Warsaw. Her father was Maurycy, a lawyer and her mother Salomea. In 1915, she entered the Warsaw University, newly opened after the Russians left Warsaw, studying physics. She was one of only four women admitted in the first year of studies. In 1924, she became the first doctor promoted by the Department of Physics; her doctoral advisor was Stefan Pieńkowski. She worked as a senior assistant at the Department of Experimental Physics at Warsaw University and has ...

#10468

Elisabeth Rotten

1882 - 1964 (82 years)

Elisabeth Friederike Rotten was a Quaker peace activist and educational progressive. Life As daughter to the Swiss couple Moritz and Luise Rotten, she attended the "höhere Mädchenschule Luisenschule" during 1888-1898, later studying at the Victoria-Lyzeum Berlin from 1904. In September 1906 she took the Reifeprüfung at the Kaiserin Augusta-Gymnasium Charlottenburg. She graduated in her studies in philosophy and German language and literature in Heidelberg, Berlin, Marburg and Montpellier. In Marburg she met with Hermann Lietz and Gustav Wyneken, which was vital to the future development of her thinking.

#10469

Luigi Carnera

1875 - 1962 (87 years)

Luigi Carnera was an Italian astronomer and mathematician. He discovered 16 minor planets in the early 20th century. The main-belt asteroid 39653 Carnera was named in his honour. In his early career he worked as Max Wolf's assistant at Heidelberg, Germany he discovered a number of asteroids. He worked in Germany, Italy and Argentina before returning to Italy for good in 1908.

#10470

David Enskog

1884 - 1947 (63 years)

David Enskog was a Swedish mathematical physicist. Enskog helped develop the kinetic theory of gases by extending the Maxwell–Boltzmann equations. Biography After undergraduate studies at Uppsala University he received a licentiate degree in physics in 1911, working on gas diffusion under professor Gustaf Granqvist, who was an experimentalist. Enskog did not wish to continue with experimental physics, however, and transferred to professor Carl Wilhelm Oseen for his Ph.D. From 1913, Enskog worked as a high school teacher in mathematics and physics to support himself and his family, while continuing his research and thesis writing in his free time.

#10471

Oswald Thomas

1882 - 1963 (81 years)

Oswald Thomas , was an astronomer and a protagonist of the popularization of astronomy in Germany and Austria. Career Thomas's father Karl, a girls' school director, imbued his son with the fascination of astronomical phenomenology from early on. In 1907 Oswald Thomas organized a formal registration system for fireball observations in his home town Kronstadt and named this institution Astronomisches Büro . Its tasks soon extended to a broader range of adult education in astronomy.

#10472

Gladys Mackenzie

1903 - 1972 (69 years)

Gladys Isabel Harper was a Scottish physicist who studied X-rays. She taught physics at Newnham College, Cambridge and was a research fellow of the University of Bristol. She conducted research in X-ray physics, focusing on topics such as alpha particles, X-ray monochromatization, and spectroscopy. Her research of alpha particles proved that the theory of Gaunt can also be applied to molecular hydrogen. She also developed through her research of crystal and slit systems a quantitative general theory for analysis of composite radiation and production of monochromatic beams. She attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated with an MA and BSc in mathematics and natural philosophy.

#10473

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.

#10474

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.

#10475

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.

#10476

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.

#10477

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...

#10478

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.

#10479

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.

#10480

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...

#10481

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.

#10482

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...

#10483

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.

#10484

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.

#10485

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.

#10486

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.

#10487

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.

#10488

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.

#10489

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.

#10490

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.

#10491

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.

#10492

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.

#10493

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.

#10494

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.

#10495

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.

#10496

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.

#10497

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.

#10498

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.

#10499

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.

#10500

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.

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