The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#10851
Thomas Russell Wilkins
1891 - 1940 (49 years)
Thomas Russell Wilkins was a Canadian physicist. Wilkins received in 1912 his bachelor's degree in physics from McMaster University . He began graduate study in physics at the University of Chicago and taught at Brandon College, where he was head of the department of mathematics and physics from 1918 to 1925. In 1921 he received his PhD from the University of Chicago with his thesis Multiple valency in the ionization by alpha rays. In 1924 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1924 in Toronto.
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Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
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Harold Knox-Shaw
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Harold Knox-Shaw was an English astronomer. He was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. He was the oldest of four siblings. During his youth he earned scholarships to Wellington College in Berkshire and to Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1907 ranked as Sixth Wrangler. A year following his graduation he became an assistant at the Khedivial Astronomical Observatory in Helwan, Egypt. He was elected Fellow of the Society in 1908. In 1910 he became the first to photograph Halley's comet from this site.
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Arthur W. Conway
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Arthur William Conway FRS was a distinguished Irish mathematician and mathematical physicist who wrote one of the first books on relativity and co-edited two volumes of William Rowan Hamilton's collected works. He also served as President of University College Dublin between 1940 and 1947.
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Vibert Douglas
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Allie Vibert Douglas, , who usually went by her middle name, was a Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist. Life Douglas was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 15 December 1894. Because both of Douglas' parents died the year she was born, she first lived in London, England with her brother George Vibert Douglas, and her grandmother. Douglas' grandfather was Rev. George Douglas, a prominent Methodist minister and educator. In 1904 both Douglas and her brother returned to Montreal where they attended Westmount High School. Growing up, Douglas was interested in science but felt that her gender was a handicap.
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Jagadish Chandra Bose
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath with interests in biology, physics, botany and writing science fiction. He was a pioneer in the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the Moon was named in his honour. He founded the Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia.
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Pavel Cherenkov
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was a Soviet physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934. Biography Cherenkov was born in 1904 to Alexey Cherenkov and Mariya Cherenkova in the small village of Novaya Chigla. This town is in present-day Voronezh Oblast, Russia.
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Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber. Education and early life Wilson was born in the parish of Glencorse, Midlothian to Annie Clark Harper and John Wilson, a sheep farmer. After his father died in 1873, he moved with his family to Manchester. With financial support from his step-brother he studied biology at Owens College, now the University of Manchester, with the intent of becoming a doctor. In 1887, he graduated from the College with a BSc. He won a scholarship to attend Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he became interested in physics and chemistry.
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Alice Hall Farnsworth
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Alice Hall Farnsworth was an American astronomer. She was director of John Payson Williston Observatory at Mount Holyoke College from 1936 until her retirement in 1957. Early life Alice Hall Farnsworth was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children of Frederick Tudor Farnsworth and Anna Caroline Tufts Farnsworth. As a child, she was an active reader of St. Nicholas magazine, submitting contest entries and winning prizes.
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Tokubei Kuroda
1886 - 1987 (101 years)
Tokubei Kuroda was a Japanese scientist and academic. He is best known as a pioneering taxonomist and malacologist specializing in Japanese marine and terrestrial Mollusca. Early life Kuroda was born at Fukura on the island of Awaji. He graduated middle school at 15, and was recruited as a houseboy by Yoichiro Hirase, a Kyoto dealer in poultry, seeds and aviculture products who had founded a side business trading in marine and land shells. While his employment initially included cleaning Hirase's large house and looking after his children by day, Hirase paid for Kuroda to attend night school...
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Marshal Henry Wrubel
1924 - 1968 (44 years)
Marshal Henry Wrubel was a child prodigy in music, an astrophysicist, and the first director of Indiana University's Research Computing Center. At age 11 Marshal Wrubel entered the Juilliard School to study piano. In 1944 he graduated from Juilliard and also graduated from CUNY with a B.A. in physics. After graduation, he served in the U. S. Army for two years and worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. After completing his military service Wrubel entered in 1946 the astrophysics doctoral program of the University of Chicago and received in 1949 his Ph.D. under Chandrasekhar. He spent...
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Vladimir Sukachev
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Vladimir Nikolayevich Sukachev was a Russian geobotanist, engineer, geographer, and corresponding member and full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His wife was Henrietta Ippolitovna Poplavskaja.
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J. Hans D. Jensen
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranium Club, where he contributed to the separation of uranium isotopes. After the war, Jensen was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Institute for Advanced Study, University of California, Berkeley, Indiana University, and the California Institute of Technology.
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Willem de Sitter
1872 - 1934 (62 years)
Willem de Sitter was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Life and work Born in Sneek, de Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory. He worked at the Cape Observatory in South Africa . Then, in 1908, de Sitter was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Leiden University. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1919 until his death.
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Norman Hilberry
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Norman Hilberry was an American physicist, best known as the director of the Argonne National Laboratory from 1956 to 1961. In December 1942 he was the man who stood ready with an axe to cut the scram line during the start up of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor to achieve criticality.
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Bruno Thüring
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Bruno Jakob Thüring was a German physicist and astronomer. Thüring studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy at the University of Munich and received his doctorate in 1928, under Alexander Wilkens and Arnold Sommerfeld. Wilkens was a professor of astronomy and director of the Munich Observatory, which was part of the University. From 1928 to 1933, he was an assistant at the Munich Observatory. From 1934 to 1935, he was an assistant to Heinrich Vogt at the University of Heidelberg. Thüring completed his Habilitation there in 1935, whereupon he became an Observator at the Munich Observatory. In 1937, Thüring became a lecturer at the University of Munich.
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Henry A. Bumstead
1870 - 1920 (50 years)
Henry Andrews Bumstead was an American physicist who taught at Yale from 1897 to 1920. In 1918 he was scientific attache to the United States embassy in London. In 1920 he was Chairman of the National Research Council.
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Pierre Fatou
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou was a French mathematician and astronomer. He is known for major contributions to several branches of analysis. The Fatou lemma and the Fatou set are named after him. Biography
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Edward Fitzpatrick
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Edward Augustus Fitzpatrick was an American college administrator, author, editor, government official, military officer, and conscription expert. From 1929 to 1954, he served as president of Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was known for being one of the country's foremost experts on military draft policy during World War I and World War II.
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Rex Mortimer
1926 - 1979 (53 years)
Rex Alfred Mortimer was an Australian academic and expert on communism. Mortimer attended Melbourne High School and received a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Melbourne in 1947. He became a member of the Communist Party of Australia at the university and remained active until 1969. He completed a doctorate dissertation on the Communist Party of Indonesia at Monash University in 1971 under the guidance of Herbert Feith. Mortimer went on to become a faculty member of the University of Sydney before dying of cancer at Royal North Shore Hospital on New Year's Eve 1979. Peter Singer...
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Wu Youxun
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Wu Youxun , also known as Y. H. Woo, was a Chinese physicist. His courtesy name was Zhèngzhī . Biography Wu graduated from the Department of Physics of Nanjing Higher Normal School , and was later associated with the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University. He served as president of National Central University and Jiaotong University in Shanghai. When he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago he studied x-ray and electron scattering, and verified the Compton effect which gave Arthur Compton the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Carlos Varsavsky
1933 - 1983 (50 years)
Carlos M. Varsavsky was an Argentine astrophysicist. Early life Varsavsky was born in Buenos Aires in 1933. After completing secondary studies in the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, he settled in the United States. In the US, Varsavsky graduated in physical engineering, in which he also obtained a master's degree from the University of Colorado. In 1959 he did his doctorate in astronomy at Harvard University. He was the younger brother of Argentinian mathematician and social scientist Oscar Varsavsky.
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Henrietta Hill Swope
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies.
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Aleksandr Mikhailov
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Mikhailov was an astronomer who was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He worked at Pulkovo Observatory from 1947 to 1982. He was its director until 1964 and is credited with leading its post-war revival after the fall of Leningrad.
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Leland Cunningham
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Leland Erskin Cunningham was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. In a career spanning 50 years, he became an authority on orbit theory and on precise measurements of the orbits of comets, planets, satellites, and space probes. He was also an early authority on electronic digital computers and assisted in their construction and use in orbit calculations.
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Louis Dunoyer de Segonzac
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Louis Dominique Joseph Armand Dunoyer de Segonzac was a French physicist. He was awarded the Valz Prize by the French Academy of Sciences in 1929 for research on spirit levels and on photoelectric cells as applied to astronomy.
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Bohuslav Hostinský
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Bohuslav Hostinský was a Czechoslovak mathematician and theoretical physicist. Family His father Otakar Hostinský was a musicologist and professor of aesthetics at Charles University. Bohuslav Hostinský was the eldest of four siblings.
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Mildred Allen
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Mildred Allen was an American physicist. Biography Early life and education Mildred Allen was born in Sharon, Massachusetts to MIT professor C. Frank Allen and Caroline Hadley Allen. She had one younger sister, Margaret Allen Anderson.
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Adolfas Jucys
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Adolfas Pranaitis Jucys was a Lithuanian theoretical physicist and mathematician, and inducted member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in 1953. He graduated from Kaunas University in 1931 and later worked with both creators of the self-consistent field method – Douglas Hartree in Manchester and Vladimir Fock in Leningrad . Adolfas Jucys created the scientific school of theoretical physics in Vilnius, was the head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Vilnius University . He organized the first Institute of Physics and Mathematics in Lithuania and was its first director , and later...
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Martha Betz Shapley
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Martha Betz Shapley was an American astronomer known for her research on eclipsing binary stars. Early life Shapley was born on August 3, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of seven children of school music teacher Carl Betz and his wife. Her family were descendants of German immigrants, and her grandfather once told her that he had seen astronomer Caroline Herschel in the streets of Hanover in Germany. Her mother and two sisters became schoolteachers, and Shapley herself became a schoolteacher at age 15. Three years later, she began her studies at the University of Missouri, where she earn...
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Pyotr Lukirsky
1896 - 1954 (58 years)
Pyotr Ivanovich Lukirsky was a Soviet physicist who specialized in experimental physics in radiation and optics. He was a student of Abram Ioffe and became a fellow of the Physico-Technical Institute. He contributed to industrial developments as well as to crystallography and basic physics.
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Oscar P. Snyder
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Oscar Peter Snyder was a United States Army major general who served in the Army Medical Department as a Chief of the U.S. Army Dental Corps from 1954 to 1956. Biography World War I Oscar Peter Snyder was born to Emil and Anna Snyder on 6 January 1895 near Millersburg, Holmes County, Ohio. He attended the Orrsville public schools graduating in 1912. He entered The Ohio State University College of Dentistry and graduated with the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery in June 1916. He was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Regular Army on 24 October 1916. He first served at Columbus Barracks...
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A. L. Narayan
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Appadvedula Lakshmi Narayan, better known as A. L. Narayan BA, MA, D.Sc., F.I.P. was an Indian astrophysicist and was the first Indian Director of Kodaikanal Solar Observatory during between 1937 and 1946. He was born in 1887 to Shri Appadvedula Vyasulu and Smt. Mahalakshmi in the Mukkamala village of East Godavari District of Andhra Pradesh. He studied up to matriculation in the higher secondary school at Kothapeta. He developed keen interest in the study of Science and continued his studies in the Government Arts College, Rajahmundry. He passed the B.A. degree and did Postgraduation in Physics from the University of Madras in 1914.
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Antonino Lo Surdo
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Antonino Lo Surdo was an Italian physicist. He was appointed as professor of physics at the Istituto di Fisica in Rome in 1919; upon the death of Orso Mario Corbino in 1937, he became the director. Lo Surdo studied terrestrial physics, including seismology and geophysics; the 1908 Messina earthquake caused the death of his parents and other close relatives, except his brother. He contributed to the foundation of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica under the auspices of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, when its president was Guglielmo Marconi.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ernst Abbe
1840 - 1905 (65 years)
Ernst Karl Abbe was a German physicist, optical scientist, entrepreneur, and social reformer. Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, he developed numerous optical instruments. He was also a co-owner of Carl Zeiss AG, a German manufacturer of scientific microscopes, astronomical telescopes, planetariums, and other advanced optical systems.
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John Couch Adams
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
John Couch Adams was a British mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, and died in Cambridge. His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to each other, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would send his coordinates to Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, who confirmed the existence of the planet on 23 Septemb...
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Joseph Henry
1797 - 1878 (81 years)
Joseph Henry was an American scientist who served as the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the secretary for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. He also served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1868 to 1878.
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Giovanni Domenico Cassini
1625 - 1712 (87 years)
Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard state. Cassini is known for his work on astronomy and engineering. He discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn and noted the division of the rings of Saturn; the Cassini Division was named after him. Giovanni Domenico Cassini was also the first of his family to begin work on the project of creating a topographic map of France.
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François Arago
1786 - 1853 (67 years)
Dominique François Jean Arago , known simply as François Arago , was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries and politician. Early life and work Arago was born at Estagel, a small village of 3,000 near Perpignan, in the of Pyrénées-Orientales, France, where his father held the position of Treasurer of the Mint. His parents were François Bonaventure Arago and Marie Arago .
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Anders Jonas Ångström
1814 - 1874 (60 years)
Anders Jonas Ångström was a Swedish physicist and one of the founders of the science of spectroscopy. Ångström is also well known for his studies of astrophysics, heat transfer, terrestrial magnetism, and the aurora borealis. In 1852, Ångström formulated in Optiska undersökningar , a law of absorption, later modified somewhat and known as Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation.
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Henry Moseley
1887 - 1915 (28 years)
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.
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Franz Xaver von Zach
1754 - 1832 (78 years)
Baron Franz Xaver von Zach was a Hungarian astronomer born at Pest, Hungary . Biography Zach studied physics at the Royal University of Pest, and served for some time in the Austrian army. He taught at the University of Lemberg and worked in its observatory. He lived in Paris in 1780–83, and in London from 1783 to 1786 as tutor in the house of the Saxon ambassador, Hans Moritz von Brühl. In Paris and London he entered the circles of astronomers like Joseph de Lalande, Pierre-Simon Laplace and William Herschel. In 1786 he was appointed by Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg director of the new observatory on Seeberg hill at Gotha, which was finished in 1791.
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Johann Heinrich Lambert
1728 - 1777 (49 years)
Johann Heinrich Lambert was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, generally identified as either Swiss or French, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, physics , philosophy, astronomy and map projections.
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August Ferdinand Möbius
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. Early life and education Möbius was born in Schulpforta, Electorate of Saxony, and was descended on his mother's side from religious reformer Martin Luther. He was home-schooled until he was 13, when he attended the college in Schulpforta in 1803, and studied there, graduating in 1809. He then enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied astronomy under the mathematician and astronomer Karl Mollweide. In 1813, he began to study astronomy under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen, while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory.
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