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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#10751

Harald Herborg Nielsen

1903 - 1973 (70 years)

Harald Herborg Nielsen was an American physicist. Biography He was born in Menominee, Michigan, to Knud Nielsen and Maren Sorensen, immigrant parents who had moved to the United States from Denmark. He was the brother of Alvin H. Nielsen.

#10752

Gordon Sutherland

1907 - 1980 (73 years)

Sir Gordon Brims Black McIvor Sutherland FRS was a Scottish physicist. Biography Sutherland was born on 8 April 1907 at Watten, Caithness. He was the youngest of seven children of Peter Sutherland and Eliza Hope , both teachers. He was taught by his parents until he was ten, when he attended Leven Academy for a year before moving to Morgan Academy in Dundee for 6 years. From there he went to the University of St Andrews where he took the unusual route of studying for a double degree: an MA in mathematics and applied mathematics, and a BSc in physics. This involved a 5-year combination of courses that had not been taken before.

#10753

Stanley Corrsin

1920 - 1986 (66 years)

Stanley Corrsin was an American physicist, fluid dynamicist, and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He was known for his contributions in the field of fluid dynamics in general and turbulence in particular. He was a recipient of Fluid Dynamics Prize in 1983. Corrsin died of cancer on 2 June 1986 at the age of 66.

#10754

Henry G. Booker

1910 - 1988 (78 years)

Henry George Booker was an Anglo-American physicist and electrical engineer. Booker was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was head of panel on stratospheric pollution. He was a head of the Maths Group at Worth focused on radio propagation. He was director of the Cornell University’s school of electrical engineering, and the founder of department of electrical engineering and computer science at University of California, San Diego. The New York Times called Booker "worldwide authority on radio wave propagation", as well as "one of the world's foremost authorities on the propag...

#10755

Harvey Fletcher

Harvey Fletcher

1884 - 1981 (97 years)

Harvey Fletcher was an American physicist. Known as the "father of stereophonic sound", he is credited with the invention of the 2-A audiometer and an early electronic hearing aid. He was an investigator into the nature of speech and hearing, and made contributions in acoustics, electrical engineering, speech, medicine, music, atomic physics, sound pictures, and education. Following his death, he was credited with collaborating with his doctoral advisor, Robert Millikan, on the Nobel-prize winning oil drop experiment which first determined the charge of the electron.

#10756

Victor Conrad

1876 - 1962 (86 years)

Victor Conrad was an Austrian-American physicist, seismologist, and meteorologist. He was the first director of the Austrian seismological service and a reputed academician of international accomplishment. He was politically victimized twice, in 1919 for his ethnicity and in 1934 as a socialist. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, continuing his academic career in New York, California, and Cambridge. Conrad's scientific work is documented in more than 240 papers concerning meteorology, climatology and seismology. In 1944, he published "Methods in Climatology" . Later editions, starting in 1950, listed Leo W.

#10757

Allen Shenstone

1893 - 1980 (87 years)

Allen Goodrich Shenstone, was a Canadian physicist. He earned bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cambridge. After a brief stint as a junior faculty member at the University of Toronto, he returned to Princeton, where he was a professor in the Department of Physics 1925–62. He chaired the department 1949–60. He worked primarily in the field of atomic spectroscopy. He was awarded the Military Cross for his service in the Royal Engineers in World War I and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for ...

#10758

Bengt Strömgren

Bengt Strömgren

1908 - 1987 (79 years)

Bengt Georg Daniel Strömgren was a Danish astronomer and astrophysicist. Life and career Bengt Strömgren was born in Gothenburg. His parents were Hedvig Strömgren and Elis Strömgren, who was professor of astronomy at the University of Copenhagen and director of the University Observatory in Copenhagen. Bengt grew up in the professor's mansion surrounded with scientists, assistants, observers and guests. His father paced and promoted Bengt into a life with science, and Bengt's first paper was published already at the age of 14. He graduated from high school in 1925 and enrolled at the Copenhagen university.

#10759

Francis Sears

1898 - 1975 (77 years)

Francis Weston Sears was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at MIT for 35 years before moving to Dartmouth College in 1956. At Dartmouth, Sears was the Appleton Professor of Physics. He is best known for co-authoring University Physics, an introductory physics textbook, with Mark Zemansky. The book, first published in 1949, is often referred to as "Sears and Zemansky", although Hugh Young became a coauthor in 1973.

#10760

Samuel Jackson Barnett

1873 - 1956 (83 years)

Samuel Jackson Barnett was an American physicist. He was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Barnett was born in Woodson County, Kansas, the son of a minister. In 1894, he received a B.A. in physics from the University of Denver and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1898. From 1898 to 1918 he taught at several universities: Colorado College, Stanford University, Tulane University, and Ohio State University. In 1903 he published his book Elements of Electromagnetic Theory, which he dedicated to his friend Professor Francis H. Smith at the University of Vir...

#10761

Heinz Pagels

1939 - 1988 (49 years)

Heinz Rudolf Pagels was an American physicist, an associate professor of physics at Rockefeller University, the executive director and chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He wrote the popular science books The Cosmic Code , Perfect Symmetry , and The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity .

#10762

Jerrold R. Zacharias

Jerrold R. Zacharias

1905 - 1986 (81 years)

Jerrold Reinach Zacharias was an American physicist and institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an education reformer. His scientific work was in the area of nuclear physics.

#10763

Hans Wolter

1911 - 1978 (67 years)

Hans Wolter was a German physicist who designed an aplanatic system of grazing incidence mirrors that satisfied the Abbe sine condition . Wolter showed such a system could be produced using a combination of a paraboloid with either a hyperboloid or ellipsoid secondary. The three simplest designs are outlined and are known as Wolter telescopes of types I, II and III.

#10764

Bernard Lippmann

1914 - 1988 (74 years)

Bernard Abram Lippmann. was an American theoretical physicist. A former Professor of Physics at New York University, Lippmann is mainly known for the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, a widely used tool in non-relativistic scattering theory, which he formulated together with his doctoral supervisor Julian Schwinger

#10765

Ralph A. Sawyer

Ralph A. Sawyer

1895 - 1978 (83 years)

Ralph Alanson Sawyer was an American physicist and a leader in American science. A New Hampshire native, he graduated from the Atkinson Academy in 1911 and in 1915 from Dartmouth. He then went to the University of Chicago where, under the direction of R. A. Millikan, he finished his PhD in 1919, a time during which he also served as a scientific liaison officer in the United States Navy. At the invitation of Harrison M. Randall, Sawyer then joined the faculty of the physics department at the University of Michigan, an affiliation that he retained for his entire career.

#10766

Joseph Henry Keenan

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.

#10767

Marianus Czerny

1896 - 1985 (89 years)

Marianus Czerny was a German experimental physicist who focused on molecular spectroscopy, especially infrared spectroscopy. He was Professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. Early life and education He was the son of the pediatrician Adalbert Czerny, his mother was the daughter of a large landowner in Upper Silesia. He attended high school in Strasbourg and later achieved the rank of lieutenant in the Guards Infantry.

#10768

Harold Masursky

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Harold Masursky was an American astrogeologist. After leaving Yale University without defending his dissertation, he started his career in the early 1950s as a field geologist in Wyoming and Colorado working for the United States Geological Survey . In the early 1960s, he moved to the Astrogeology division of the USGS and began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona as a founding planetary geologist at the newly constructed USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Throughout his professional career with the USGS, his wo...

#10769

Robert Brode

1900 - 1986 (86 years)

Robert Bigham Brode was an American physicist, who during World War II led the group at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the fuses used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

#10770

Arthur Edward Ruark

1899 - 1979 (80 years)

Arthur Edward Ruark was an American physicist and academic known for his role in the development of quantum mechanics. He wrote the book Atoms, Molecules, and Quanta with Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Harold Clayton Urey in 1930, and is the author of numerous scientific papers on quantum physics.

#10771

Gopinath Kartha

1927 - 1984 (57 years)

Gopinath Kartha was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. In 1967, he determined the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States.

#10772

Alfred Landé

1888 - 1976 (88 years)

Alfred Landé was a German-American physicist known for his contributions to quantum theory. He is responsible for the Landé g-factor and an explanation of the Zeeman effect. Life and achievements Alfred Landé was born on 13 December 1888 in Elberfeld, Rhineland, Germany, today part of the city of Wuppertal.

#10773

Brenna Flaugher

Brenna Lynn Flaugher is an experimental cosmologist who works as a distinguished scientist at Fermilab, where she heads the Astrophysics Department. Flaugher led the development of the Dark Energy Camera at the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile, part of the Dark Energy Survey; she has also been involved in the development of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. By seeking a greater understanding of dark matter, she aims to explain the observed accelerating expansion of the universe.

#10774

John J. Livingood

1903 - 1986 (83 years)

John Jacob Livingood was an American nuclear physicist specialising in the design of particle accelerators. With Glenn Seaborg he discovered and characterized a number of new radioisotopes useful for nuclear medicine, including cobalt-60, iodine-131 and iron-59.

#10775

Manuel Sandoval Vallarta

Manuel Sandoval Vallarta

1898 - 1976 (78 years)

Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was a Mexican physicist. He was a Physics professor at both MIT and the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . Biography Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico City into a family that descended from Ignacio Vallarta, a prominent liberal leader during the War of Reform. He received his B.S. in physics from MIT in 1921; in 1924, MIT awarded him his Ph.D. He joined MIT's physics faculty in 1923, eventually rising to the rank of full professor. In 1927, Vallarta received a two-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study physics in Germany. The Un...

#10776

Robert Julius Trumpler

1886 - 1956 (70 years)

Robert Julius Trumpler was a Swiss-American astronomer. Career After initial schooling, Trumpler entered the Universität Zürich but later transferred to the University of Göttingen where he earned his PhD in 1910. In 1915, during World War I, he emigrated to the United States and joined the University of California. He took a position at Allegheny Observatory, and later went to Lick Observatory. In 1921, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1932.

#10777

George Yuri Rainich

1886 - 1968 (82 years)

George Yuri Rainich was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. Career Rainich studied mathematics from 1904 to 1908 in Odessa, in Göttingen , and in Munich , eventually obtaining his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Kazan. After teaching at the University of Kazan, in 1922 , he emigrated with his wife to the United States. After three years at Johns Hopkins University, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he remained until his retirement in 1956. After his retirement as professor emeritus, he was in 1957 at Brown University as a member...

#10778

William G. Pollard

William G. Pollard

1911 - 1989 (78 years)

William Grosvenor Pollard was an American physicist and an Episcopal priest. He started his career as a professor of physics in 1936 at the University of Tennessee. In 1946 he championed the organization of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies . He was its executive director until 1974. He was ordained as a priest in 1954. He authored and co-authored a significant amount of material in the areas of Christianity and Science and Religion found in books, book chapters, and journal articles. He was sometimes referred to as the "atomic deacon".

#10779

Marc Aaronson

1950 - 1987 (37 years)

Marc Aaronson was an American astronomer. Life Aaronson was born in Los Angeles. He was educated at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a BS in 1972. He completed his Ph.D. in 1977 at Harvard University with a dissertation on the near-infrared aperture photometry of galaxies. He joined Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona as a postdoctoral research associate in 1977 and became an Associate Professor of Astronomy in 1983. Aaronson and Jeremy Mould won the George Van Biesbroeck Prize in 1981 and the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1984 from the American Astronomical Society.

#10780

Sutherland Simpson

1863 - 1926 (63 years)

Sutherland Simpson FRSE was a Scottish physician who emigrated to the United States to become Professor of Physiology at Cornell University. Life He was born at Saraquoy on the island of Flotta in the Orkney Isles on 3 February 1863, the eldest son of Margaret and Sutherland Simpson. He attended a school on the island run by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. He worked on his father's croft and aimed to be master of a sailing ship so studied navigation under a teacher on the island, John Brown Gorrie.

#10781

Harvey Elliott White

1902 - 1988 (86 years)

Harvey Elliott White was an American physicist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Early life and education White was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, but grew up in Pasadena, California. He received an A.B. from Occidental College in 1925 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1929. In 1929–30 he was a National Research Council Fellow at the Physikalische Technische Reichsanstalt in Germany, working on atomic spectroscopy under Friedrich Paschen.

#10782

James P. C. Southall

1871 - 1962 (91 years)

James P. C. Southall was an American physicist, professor at Columbia University , and specialist in optics. He was president of the Optical Society of America and translator of Physiological Optics by Helmholtz.

#10783

John Backus

1911 - 1988 (77 years)

John Graham Backus was a Lithuanian American physicist and acoustician. John Backus was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, where he studied at Reed College, receiving a BA in 1932. He went on to graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did research in nuclear physics at the Radiation Laboratory under Ernest Lawrence. He received an MA in 1936, and a PhD in 1940. In 1945 he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Southern California, a post he retained until his retirement in 1980. During the early part of his career, his research focussed on gaseous discharges in strong magnetic fields.

#10784

Ernst Ising

1900 - 1998 (98 years)

Ernst Ising was a German physicist, who is best remembered for the development of the Ising model. He was a professor of physics at Bradley University until his retirement in 1976. Life Ernst Ising was born in Cologne in 1900. Ernst Ising's parents were the merchant Gustav Ising and his wife Thekla Löwe. After school, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Göttingen and University of Hamburg. In 1922, he began researching ferromagnetism under the guidance of Wilhelm Lenz. He earned a Ph.D in physics from the University of Hamburg in 1924 when he published his doctoral thesis .

#10785

Sidney Wilcox McCuskey

1907 - 1979 (72 years)

Sidney Wilcox McCuskey was an American mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio on February 28, 1907, the son of Charles McCuskey and Lottie . In 1925 Sidney became an amateur radio hobbyist. He matriculated to the Case School of Applied Science where in 1929 he was awarded a B.S. in Civil Engineering. The following year he received his M.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a stint at surveying, he was influenced by Jason John Nassau to study astronomy at Harvard University. There his graduate adviser was the Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok.

#10786

Paul Herget

1908 - 1981 (73 years)

Paul Herget was an American astronomer and director of the Cincinnati Observatory, who established the Minor Planet Center after World War II. Career Herget taught astronomy at the University of Cincinnati. He was a pioneer in the use of machine methods, and eventually digital computers, in the solving of scientific and specifically astronomical problems .

#10787

Alexander Rankine

1881 - 1956 (75 years)

Alexander Oliver Rankine was a British physicist who worked on the viscosity of gases, molecular dynamics, optics, acoustics and geophysics. Career Rankine carried out government research during both World Wars, working on anti-submarine technology and on fog dispersal systems. He studied and worked at University College London, and was a professor of physics at Imperial College London.

#10788

Leonard Huxley

1902 - 1988 (86 years)

Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley was an Australian physicist. Huxley was born in London, the eldest son of George Hamborough and Lilian Huxley. He was a second-cousin once removed of Thomas Huxley. His family migrated from England to Australia in 1905 when he was three, and settled in Tasmania, where Huxley showed great academic and sporting promise while attending The Hutchins School. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to New College, Oxford while in his second year at the University of Tasmania and obtained a D.Phil. from Oxford in 1928. On 5 October 1929 he married Ella Mary Child 'Molly' Co...

#10789

Paul R. Heyl

1872 - 1961 (89 years)

Paul Renno Heyl was an American inventor, physicist, and author. Biography Born in Philadelphia, Heyl earned his PhD in physics in 1899 from the University of Pennsylvania. For several years he taught in high schools in Pennsylvania. In 1907, he won the Franklin Institute's Boyden Premium. In 1910, he joined the physics staff of the Commercial Research Corporation in New York. In 1920, he was employed as a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington D.C. With Lyman J. Briggs, Heyl invented the Heyl–Briggs earth inductor compass. The compass used a spinning electric coil mounted in an airplane to determine the airplane's bearing in relation to the Earth's magnetic field.

#10790

Robert J. Van de Graaff

Robert J. Van de Graaff

1901 - 1967 (66 years)

Robert Jemison Van de Graaff was an American physicist, noted for his design and construction of high-voltage Van de Graaff generators. He spent most of his career in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#10791

Gideon Mer

1894 - 1961 (67 years)

Gideon Mer was an Israeli scientist whose work was mostly concerned with the eradication of malaria. He was the father of Arna Mer-Khamis and the grandfather of Juliano Mer-Khamis. Biography Gideon Mer was born in Lithuania, then part of Imperial Russia. He studied medicine in France. He immigrated to Palestine in 1914. During World War I he was a medical officer in the Jewish Legion, a unit of the British Army, and served at Gallipoli, in Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. After the war he returned to Rosh Pinna, a Jewish settlement in the north of Palestine, and his laboratory there eventually b...

#10792

Roswell Clifton Gibbs

1878 - 1966 (88 years)

Roswell Clifton Gibbs was Chairman of the Department of Physics at Cornell University from 1934 to 1946. A graduate of Cornell, he became an assistant professor of Physics there in 1912, and a professor in 1918. His research primarily concerned spectroscopy, and he was the author or co-author of over forty research papers. As Chairman of the Department of Physics, he hired distinguished physicists including Stanley Livingston, Robert Bacher and Hans Bethe, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work at Cornell. After World War II, Gibbs was Chairman of the Mathematical and Physical...

#10793

Vikram Sarabhai

Vikram Sarabhai

1919 - 1971 (52 years)

Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai Jain was an Indian physicist and astronomer who initiated space research and helped to develop nuclear power in India. He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1966 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1972.

#10794

Alexander Vyssotsky

Alexander Vyssotsky

1888 - 1973 (85 years)

Alexander Nikolayevich Vyssotsky was a Russian-American astronomer. Born in Moscow, in 1923 he moved to the United States, where he eventually became professor at the University of Virginia and vice-president of the American Astronomical Society.

#10795

Cornelis Zwikker

1900 - 1985 (85 years)

Cornelis Zwikker was a Dutch scientist. Zwikker was born in Zaandam as the son of Klaartje Dil and the shopkeeper Klaas Cornelisz Zwikker. He married Johanna Dorothea Theinert in 1924 in Zaandam. In 1918 he had started studying chemistry and later physics at the University of Amsterdam, where in 1925 he obtained his PhD with the thesis "Physical properties of wolfram at high temperatures" under supervision of the Noble-laureate Pieter Zeeman. From 1923 he worked as scientific researcher at Philips in Eindhoven, but in 1929 he was appointed professor in theoretical and applied physics at the Delft University of Technology.

#10796

E. Harris Harbison

1907 - 1964 (57 years)

Elmore Harris Harbison was an American historian and scholar on the topic of Christianity and history. He was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University and a trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary.

#10797

Myron Mathisson

1897 - 1940 (43 years)

Myron Mathisson was a theoretical physicist of Polish and Jewish descent. He is known for his work in general relativity, for developing a new method to analyze the properties of fundamental solutions of linear hyperbolic partial differential equations, and proved, in a special case, the Hadamard conjecture on the class of equations that satisfy the Huygens principle.

#10798

John Harry Williams

1908 - 1966 (58 years)

John Harry Williams was a Canadian-American physicist. Born in the asbestos mining town of Asbestos, Quebec, he had three brothers: Elewyn, Lloyd, and Arthur. John was an active child and participated in sports, developing a lifelong interest in the outdoors. His father, a mining engineer, died during the First World War, leaving his wife Josephine Stockwell to raise the family alone. She moved the family to Kelowna, British Columbia, where John attended public high school. He matriculated to the University of British Columbia on a full scholarship, where he graduated with a BS degree in 1928.

#10799

Julius Sumner Miller

1909 - 1987 (78 years)

Julius Sumner Miller was an American physicist and television personality. He is best known for his work on children's television programs in North America and Australia. Off-screen Julius Sumner Miller was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, as the youngest of nine children. His father was Latvian and his Lithuanian mother spoke 12 languages.

#10800

Alysia D. Marino

Alysia Diane Marino is an American experimental particle physicist. She is the Jesse L. Mitchell Endowed Chair at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2022, Marino was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "major contributions to understanding the physics of neutrino production and interactions, and for leadership in data analysis in the T2K and NA61/SHINE collaborations."

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