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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#11001

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".

#11002

Arthur Compton

1892 - 1962 (70 years)

Arthur Holly Compton was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his 1923 discovery of the Compton effect, which demonstrated the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation. It was a sensational discovery at the time: the wave nature of light had been well-demonstrated, but the idea that light had both wave and particle properties was not easily accepted. He is also known for his leadership over the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project, and served as chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1945 to 1953.

#11003

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.

#11004

Leonard I. Schiff

1915 - 1971 (56 years)

Leonard Isaac Schiff was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on March 29, 1915 and died on January 21, 1971, in Stanford, California. He was a physicist best known for his book Quantum Mechanics, originally published in 1949 .

#11005

Jesse Francis McClendon

1880 - 1976 (96 years)

Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.

#11006

Max Delbrück

1906 - 1981 (75 years)

Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück was a German–American biophysicist who participated in launching the molecular biology research program in the late 1930s. He stimulated physical scientists' interest into biology, especially as to basic research to physically explain genes, mysterious at the time. Formed in 1945 and led by Delbrück along with Salvador Luria and Alfred Hershey, the Phage Group made substantial headway unraveling important aspects of genetics. The three shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses".

#11007

Roberts Rugh

1903 - 1978 (75 years)

Roberts Rugh, Ph.D. , radiation biologist and embryologist. Life Roberts Rugh was born to Arthur and Gertrude Rugh in Springfield, Ohio on April 16, 1903, and died on 11 November 1978 in Bethesda, Maryland. Rugh married Harriette Sheldon on July 24, 1926, and the couple had two children, Mary Elizabeth Downs and William Arthur.

#11008

Edmund Clifton Stoner

1899 - 1968 (69 years)

Edmund Clifton Stoner FRS was a British theoretical physicist. He is principally known for his work on the origin and nature of itinerant ferromagnetism , including the collective electron theory of ferromagnetism and the Stoner criterion for ferromagnetism. Stoner made significant contributions to the electron configurations in the periodic table.

#11009

Earle K. Plyler

1897 - 1976 (79 years)

Earle Keith Plyler , was an American physicist and an important pioneer of infrared spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy. He is the namesake of the "Earle K. Plyler Prize" of the American Physical Society.

#11010

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.

#11011

Richard von Mises

Richard von Mises

1883 - 1953 (70 years)

Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He described his work in his own words shortly before his death as:

#11012

Alfred Harrison Joy

1882 - 1973 (91 years)

Alfred Harrison Joy was an astronomer best known for his work on stellar distances, the radial motion of stars, and variable stars. A crater on the Moon has been named in his honor. Early years He was born in Greenville, Illinois, the son of F.P. Joy, a prominent clothing merchant in Greenville and one-time mayor of the town. He received a BA from Greenville College in 1903 and an MA from Oberlin College the next year.

#11013

Max von Laue

1879 - 1960 (81 years)

Max Theodor Felix von Laue was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. In addition to his scientific endeavors with contributions in optics, crystallography, quantum theory, superconductivity, and the theory of relativity, Laue had a number of administrative positions which advanced and guided German scientific research and development during four decades. A strong objector to Nazism, he was instrumental in re-establishing and organizing German science after World War II.

#11014

Lewi Tonks

1897 - 1971 (74 years)

Lewi Tonks was an American quantum physicist noted for his discovery of the Tonks–Girardeau gas. Tonks was employed by General Electric for most of his working life, researching microwaves and ferromagnetism. He worked under Irving Langmuir on plasma physics, with a special interest in ball lightning, nuclear fusion, tungsten filament light bulbs, and lasers.

#11015

William Francis Gray Swann

1884 - 1962 (78 years)

W.F.G. Swann was an English physicist. Education He was educated at Brighton Technical College and the Royal College of Science from which he obtained a B.Sc. in 1905. He worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Sheffield, while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate at University College London, from which he received a D.Sc. in 1910.

#11016

Bruce Chalmers

1907 - 1990 (83 years)

Bruce Chalmers was a British-born and educated physicist, a metallurgy professor at Harvard University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, an editor in chief of Progress in Materials Science, master of John Winthrop House at Harvard University. An award has been established in his name - the Bruce Chalmers Award by the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. The National Academies Press said that he had "a notable career as a scientist, educator and editor". Harvard University called him "an authority in the field of metallurgy".

#11017

Jan Burgers

1895 - 1981 (86 years)

Johannes Martinus Burgers was a Dutch physicist and the brother of the physicist Wilhelm G. Burgers. Burgers studied in Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1918. He is known for the Burgers' equation, the Burgers vector in dislocation theory and the Burgers material in viscoelasticity.

#11018

Ross Gunn

1897 - 1966 (69 years)

Ross Gunn was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. The New York Times described him as "one of the true fathers of the nuclear submarine program". From 1927 to 1947, Gunn worked at the Naval Research Laboratory. He was the author of over 28 papers, and received 45 patents. He designed radio devices for controlling aircraft, which were used in the development of the first droness. He was one of the first to appreciate the possibility of using nuclear power for submarine propulsion. During World War II he was involved in the development of thermal diffu...

#11019

Pyotr Kapitsa

1894 - 1984 (90 years)

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa or Peter Kapitza was a leading Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate, whose research focused on low-temperature physics. Biography Kapitsa was born in Kronstadt, Russian Empire, to the Bessarabian Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa , a military engineer who constructed fortifications, and to the Volhynian Olga Ieronimovna Kapitsa, from a noble Polish Stebnicki family. Besides Russian, the Kapitsa family also spoke Romanian. Kapitsa's studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an ambulance driver for two years on the Polish front. He graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918.

#11020

Willem Jacob Luyten

1899 - 1994 (95 years)

Willem Jacob Luyten was a Dutch-American astronomer. Life Jacob Luyten was born in Semarang, Java, at the time part of the Dutch East Indies. His mother was Cornelia M. Francken and his father Jacob Luyten, a teacher of French.

#11021

Walter Baade

1893 - 1960 (67 years)

Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade was a German astronomer who worked in the United States from 1931 to 1959. Biography The son of a teacher, Baade finished school in 1912. He then studied maths, physics and astronomy at the universities of Münster and Göttingen. After receiving his PhD in 1919, Baade worked at Hamburg Observatory at Bergedorf from 1919 to 1931. There in 1920 he discovered 944 Hidalgo, the first of a class of minor planets now called Centaurs which cross the orbits of giant planets.

#11022

Lise Meitner

1878 - 1968 (90 years)

Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".

#11023

J. J. Sakurai

1933 - 1982 (49 years)

was a Japanese-American particle physicist and theorist. While a graduate student at Cornell University, Sakurai independently discovered the V-A theory of weak interactions. He authored the popular graduate text Modern Quantum Mechanics and other texts such as Invariance Principles and Elementary Particles and Advanced Quantum Mechanics .

#11024

Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer

1906 - 1972 (66 years)

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

#11025

Dirk Brouwer

1902 - 1966 (64 years)

Dirk Brouwer was a Dutch-American astronomer. He received his PhD in 1927 at Leiden University under Willem de Sitter and then went to Yale University. From 1941 until 1966 he was editor of the Astronomical Journal.

#11026

James Chadwick

1891 - 1974 (83 years)

Sir James Chadwick, was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atom bomb research efforts. He was the head of the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was knighted in Britain in 1945 for his achievements in physics.

#11027

Cyrus Levinthal

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Levinthal graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from University of California, Berkeley and taught physics at the University of Michigan before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1957. In 1968 he joined Columbia University as the Chairman and from 1969 Professor of the newly established Department of Biological Sciences, where he remained until his death from lung cancer in 1990. While at MIT Levinthal made significant discoveries in molecular genetics relating to the mechanisms of DNA replication, the relationship between genes and proteins, and the nature of messenger RNA.

#11028

Ronald Wilfred Gurney

1899 - 1953 (54 years)

Ronald Wilfred Gurney was a British theoretical physicist and research pupil of William Lawrence Bragg at the Victoria University of Manchester during the 1920s and 1930s, Bristol University during the 1930s and later in the US, where he died.

#11029

Frits Zernike

1888 - 1966 (78 years)

Frits Zernike was a Dutch physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953 for his invention of the phase-contrast microscope. Early life and education Frits Zernike was born on 16 July 1888 in Amsterdam, Netherlands to Carl Friedrich August Zernike and Antje Dieperink. Both parents were teachers of mathematics, and he especially shared his father's passion for physics. He studied chemistry , mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam.

#11030

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.

#11031

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.

#11032

Denis Haydon

1930 - 1988 (58 years)

Denis Arthur Haydon FRS was a Professor of Membrane Biophysics at the University of Cambridge from 1980. He was educated at Dartford Grammar School and King's College London . He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975. He was also a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he was Vice-Master from 1978 to 1982.

#11033

Charlotte Moore Sitterly

1898 - 1990 (92 years)

Charlotte Emma Moore Sitterly was an American astronomer. She is known for her extensive spectroscopic studies of the Sun and chemical elements. Her tables of data are known for their reliability and are still used regularly.

#11034

Samuel Goudsmit

Samuel Goudsmit

1902 - 1978 (76 years)

Samuel Abraham Goudsmit was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. Life and career Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Netherlands, of Dutch Jewish descent. He was the son of Isaac Goudsmit, a manufacturer of water-closets, and Marianne Goudsmit-Gompers, who ran a millinery shop. In 1943, his parents were deported to a concentration camp by the German occupiers of the Netherlands and were murdered there. Goudsmit studied physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1927. ...

#11035

Paul I. Richards

1923 - 1978 (55 years)

Paul Irving Richards was a physicist and applied mathematician. Richard's is best known to electrical engineers for the eponymous Richards' transformation. However, much of his career was concerned with radiation transport and fluid flow. Notably, he produced one of the earliest models of traffic waves on busy highways.

#11036

Allan C. G. Mitchell

1902 - 1963 (61 years)

Allan Charles Gray Mitchell was an American physicist. He was a professor and head of the Indiana University Bloomington department of physics. Early life and education Mitchell was born in 1902, the son of Milly Gray and astronomer Samuel Alfred Mitchell. He earned a master of arts in physics from University of Virginia in 1924. He completed his doctorate in physical chemistry at California Institute of Technology from 1924 to 1927. His advisor was Richard C. Tolman. He completed postdoctorate work in physics with James Franck and Arnold Sommerfeld.

#11037

Rolf Maximilian Sievert

Rolf Maximilian Sievert

1896 - 1966 (70 years)

Rolf Maximilian Sievert was a Swedish medical physicist whose major contribution was in the study of the biological effects of ionizing radiation. The sievert , the SI unit representing the stochastic health risk of ionizing radiation, is named for him. He has been called the "Father of Radiation Protection".

#11038

Valentine Bargmann

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

Valentine "Valya" Bargmann was a German-American mathematician and theoretical physicist. Biography Born in Berlin, Germany, to a German Jewish family, Bargmann studied there from 1925 to 1933. After the National Socialist Machtergreifung, he moved to Switzerland to the University of Zürich where he received his Ph.D. under Gregor Wentzel.

#11039

Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Lawrence

1901 - 1958 (57 years)

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, as well as for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

#11040

J. A. Ratcliffe

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

John Ashworth Ratcliffe CB CBE FRS was an influential British radio physicist. Biography Ratcliffe was born in Bacup, the elder son of Harry Heys Ratcliffe, a partner in the stone quarrying firm of Henry Heys and Co., and Beatrice Alice. daughter of Richard Ashworth, founder of the firm of Mitchells, Ashworth, Stansfield and Co.

#11041

Suri Bhagavantam

1909 - 1989 (80 years)

Suri Bhagavantam was an Indian scientist and administrator. He was Vice chancellor of Osmania University and Director of Indian Institute of Science and Defence Research and Development Organisation.

#11042

Karl K. Darrow

1891 - 1982 (91 years)

Karl Kelchner Darrow was an American physicist and secretary of the American Physical Society from 1941 to 1967. Biography Darrow was born on November 26, 1891, in Chicago, Illinois. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago under Robert A. Millikan in 1917. Darrow spent his working career at Western Electric from 1917 and then Bell Laboratories from its founding in 1925 until his retirement in 1956. He wrote four books and over 200 technical articles, histories, and critical reviews for professional journals, many of them in the Bell System Technical Journal. Darrow was a nephew of ...

#11043

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster

1886 - 1950 (64 years)

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster was a Canadian-American physicist best known for his work in mass spectrometry and his discovery in 1935 of the uranium isotope 235U. Early life and education Dempster was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Toronto in 1909 and 1910, respectively. He travelled to study in Germany, and then left at the outset of World War I for the United States; there he received his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago.

#11044

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.

#11045

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 .

#11046

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.

#11047

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 .

#11048

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.

#11049

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...

#11050

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.

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