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,
#11151
Robert Emden
1862 - 1940 (78 years)
Jacob Robert Emden was a Swiss astrophysicist and meteorologist. He is best known for his book, Gaskugeln: Anwendungen der mechanischen Wärmetheorie auf kosmologische und meteorologische probleme , published in 1907. It presents a mathematical model of the behaviour of polytropic gaseous stellar objects under the influence of their own gravity, known as the Lane-Emden equation.
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Archytas
428 BC - 347 BC (81 years)
Archytas was an Ancient Greek mathematician, music theorist, statesman, and strategist from the ancient city of Taras in Southern Italy. He was a scientist and philosopher affiliated with the Pythagorean school and famous for being the reputed founder of mathematical mechanics and a friend of Plato.
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Charles Fabry
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Maurice Paul Auguste Charles Fabry was a French physicist working on optics. Together with Alfred Pérot he invented the Fabry–Pérot interferometer. He is also one of the co-discoverers of the ozone layer.
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Eise Eisinga
1744 - 1828 (84 years)
Eise Jeltes Eisinga was a Frisian amateur astronomer who built the Eise Eisinga Planetarium in his house in Franeker, Dutch Republic. The orrery still exists and is the oldest functioning planetarium in the world.
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Alfred Fowler
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Alfred Fowler, CBE FRS was an English astronomer and spectroscopist. Early life and career He was born in Wilsden on the outskirts of Bradford, Yorkshire and educated at London's Normal School of Science, which was later absorbed into Imperial College, London.
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Roman Ulrich Sexl
1939 - 1986 (47 years)
Roman Ulrich Sexl was one of the leading Austrian theoretical physicists. He is famous for his textbooks on Special relativity. Life His most cited work is "On the gravitational field of a massless particle" together with Peter C. Aichelburg. Since 1972 he was professor for Cosmology and General Relativity at the University of Vienna, where, from 1969, he was director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics. From 1971 to 1975 he was the director of the Institute for Space Exploration at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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Samuel King Allison
1900 - 1965 (65 years)
Samuel King Allison was an American physicist, most notable for his role in the Manhattan Project, for which he was awarded the Medal for Merit. He was director of the Metallurgical Laboratory from 1943 until 1944, and later worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory — where he "rode herd" on the final stages of the project as part of the "Cowpuncher Committee", and read the countdown for the detonation of the Trinity nuclear test. After the war, he returned to the University of Chicago to direct the Institute for Nuclear Studies and was involved in the "scientists' movement", lobbying for civilian...
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Robert Retherford
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Robert Curtis Retherford was an American physicist. He was a graduate student of Willis Lamb at Columbia Radiation Laboratory. Retherford and Lamb performed the famous experiment revealing Lamb shift in the fine structure of hydrogen, a decisive experimental step toward a new understanding of quantum electrodynamics.
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Leonard Ornstein
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Leonard Salomon Ornstein was a Dutch physicist. Biography Ornstein studied theoretical physics with Hendrik Antoon Lorentz at University of Leiden. He subsequently carried out Ph.D. research under the supervision of Lorentz, concerning an application of the statistical mechanics of Gibbs to molecular problems.
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Petr Lazarev
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Petr Petrovich Lazarev was a biophysicist and a founder of the Soviet Institute of Physics and Biophysics . He also founded the journal Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk . Early life Lazarev was born in Moscow where his father worked as a civil engineer. After studies at a Moscow Gymnasium, he graduated from Moscow University in 1901 with a medical degree. After passing the examination to become a doctor of medicine in 1902 he worked at an ear clinic. He then became interested in mathematics and physics and passed the university examination in 1903 after studying the subjects entirely on his own.
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Louis Georges Gouy
1854 - 1926 (72 years)
Louis Georges Gouy was a French physicist. He is the namesake of the Gouy balance, the Gouy–Chapman electric double layer model and the Gouy phase. Gouy was born at Vals-les-Bains, Ardèche in 1854. He became a correspondent of the Académie des sciences in 1901, and a member in 1913.
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Walther Müller
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Walther Müller was a German physicist, most well known for his improvement of Hans Geiger's counter for ionizing radiation, now known as the Geiger-Müller tube. Walther Müller studied physics, chemistry and philosophy at the University of Kiel. In 1925 he became the first PhD student of Hans Geiger, who had just got a professorship in Kiel. Their work on ionization of gases by collision lead to the invention of the Geiger-Müller counter, a now indispensable tool for measuring radioactive radiation.
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George Frederick Charles Searle
1864 - 1954 (90 years)
George Frederick Charles Searle FRS was a British physicist and teacher. He also raced competitively as a cyclist while at the University of Cambridge. Biography Searle was born in Oakington, Cambridgeshire, England. His father was William George Searle.
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Francis G. Slack
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Francis Goddard Slack was an American physicist. He was a physics teacher, researcher, and administrator in academia who was renowned for placing equal emphasis on teaching and on research. Education Slack was born in Superior, Wisconsin on November 1, 1897. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Georgia in 1918. Thereupon, he entered the United States Army, where he was trained and commissioned as a pilot; he did not see combat in World War I, as the war ended before his graduation from pilot training. In 1921, he entered Columbia University; he received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1926.
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Heinrich Wilhelm Dove
1803 - 1879 (76 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove was a Prussian physicist and meteorologist. Early years Dove was born in Liegnitz in the Kingdom of Prussia. Dove studied history, philosophy, and the natural sciences at the University of Breslau from 1821 until 1824. In 1824 he continued his education at the University of Berlin, finishing in 1826. In 1826, he became a Privatdozent and in 1828 a Professor extraordinarius at the University of Königsberg. In 1829, he moved to Berlin and taught at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium.
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Georges Sagnac
1869 - 1928 (59 years)
Georges Sagnac was a French physicist who lent his name to the Sagnac effect, a phenomenon which is at the basis of interferometers and ring laser gyroscopes developed since the 1970s. Life and work Sagnac was born at Périgueux and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1889. While a lab assistant at the Sorbonne, he was one of the first in France to study X-rays, following Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. He belonged to a group of friends and scientists that notably included Pierre and Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, Jean Perrin, and the mathematician Émile Borel. Marie Curie says that she and her husband had traded ideas with Sagnac around the time of the discovery of radioactivity.
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Walter H. Schottky
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Walter Hans Schottky was a German physicist who played a major early role in developing the theory of electron and ion emission phenomena, invented the screen-grid vacuum tube in 1915 while working at Siemens, co-invented the ribbon microphone and ribbon loudspeaker along with Dr. Erwin Gerlach in 1924 and later made many significant contributions in the areas of semiconductor devices, technical physics and technology.
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Otto Lummer
1860 - 1925 (65 years)
Otto Richard Lummer was a German physicist and researcher. He was born in the city of Gera, Germany. With Leon Arons, Lummer helped to design and build the Arons–Lummer mercury-vapor lamp. Lummer primarily worked in the field of optics and thermal radiation. Lummer's findings, along with others, on black body radiators led Max Planck to reconcile his earlier Planck's law of black-body radiation by introducing the quantum hypothesis in 1900. In 1903, with Ernst Gehrcke, he developed the Lummer–Gehrcke interferometer. Lummer died in former Breslau, now Wrocław.
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José Antonio Balseiro
1919 - 1962 (43 years)
José Antonio Balseiro was an Argentine physicist. Balseiro studied at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in his home city, before moving to La Plata to study and research, obtaining a doctorate in physics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. His doctoral dissertation was directed by Dr. Guido Beck, an Austrian physicist who arrived as a refugee in 1943. In 1950 he received a scholarship granted by the British Council. Due to the limited funds provided by the scholarship, his wife and daughter remained in Argentina. Balseiro did his post-doctoral research at the University of Manchester, in the group directed by Léon Rosenfeld.
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Friedrich Kohlrausch
1840 - 1910 (70 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Kohlrausch was a German physicist who investigated the conductive properties of electrolytes and contributed to knowledge of their behaviour. He also investigated elasticity, thermoelasticity, and thermal conduction as well as magnetic and electrical precision measurements.
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Hans Ferdinand Mayer
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Hans Ferdinand Mayer was a German mathematician and physicist. He was the author of the "Oslo Report", a major military intelligence leak which revealed German technological secrets to the British Government shortly after the start of World War II.
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Ludwig Zehnder
1854 - 1949 (95 years)
Ludwig Louis Albert Zehnder was a Swiss physicist, one of the inventors of the Mach–Zehnder interferometer. Early life Zehnder studied mechanical engineering in Zurich from 1873 to 1875. After that, he ran a factory for electrical equipment in Basel for 15 years. However, this did not satisfy him in the long run and he went to Berlin in 1885 to study physics with Hermann von Helmholtz.
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Nikolai Kasterin
1869 - 1947 (78 years)
Nikolai Petrovich Kasterin was a physicist and a student of Aleksandr Stoletov. His 1903 doctoral dissertation, portions of which were published in German in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam under the sponsorship of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, is considered to be a pivotal contribution to multiple scattering theory by such experts as Paul Peter Ewald and Jan Korringa. The MST formalism is widely used for electronic structure calculations as well as diffraction theory, and is the subject of many books. He lived in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union.
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Giovanni Battista Riccioli
1598 - 1671 (73 years)
Giovanni Battista Riccioli, SJ was an Italian astronomer and a Catholic priest in the Jesuit order. He is known, among other things, for his experiments with pendulums and with falling bodies, for his discussion of 126 arguments concerning the motion of the Earth, and for introducing the current scheme of lunar nomenclature. He is also widely known for discovering the first double star. He argued that the rotation of the Earth should reveal itself because on a rotating Earth, the ground moves at different speeds at different times.
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Paul Ulrich Villard
1860 - 1934 (74 years)
Paul Ulrich Villard was a French chemist and physicist. He discovered gamma rays in 1900 while studying the radiation emanating from radium. Early research Villard was born in Saint-Germain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1881 and taught in several Lycées, ending with a Lycée in Montpellier. He would maintain a laboratory position at the Ecole Normale Supérieure until his retirement. At the time when he discovered what we now call gamma rays, Villard was working in the chemistry department of the École Normale Supérieure rue d'Ulm, Paris.
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Erich Regener
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Erich Rudolf Alexander Regener was a German physicist known primarily for the design and construction of instruments to measure cosmic ray intensity at various altitudes. He is also known for predicting a cosmic background radiation, for the invention of the scintillation counter which contributed to the discovery of the structure of the atom, for his calculation of the charge of an electron and for his early work on atmospheric ozone. He is also credited with the first use of rockets for scientific research.
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Edward Bouchet
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Edward Alexander Bouchet was an American physicist and educator and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale University in 1876. On the basis of his academic record he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1874, he became one of the first African Americans to graduate from Yale College.
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Ludvig Lorenz
1829 - 1891 (62 years)
Ludvig Valentin Lorenz was a Danish physicist and mathematician. He developed mathematical formulae to describe phenomena such as the relation between the refraction of light and the density of a pure transparent substance, and the relation between a metal's electrical and thermal conductivity and temperature .
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Werner Kolhörster
1887 - 1946 (59 years)
Werner Heinrich Gustav Kolhörster was a German physicist and a pioneer of research into cosmic rays. Kolhörster was born in Schwiebus , Brandenburg Province of Prussia. While attending the University of Halle, he studied physics under Friedrich Ernst Dorn.
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Carl Runge
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Carl David Tolmé Runge was a German mathematician, physicist, and spectroscopist. He was co-developer and co-eponym of the Runge–Kutta method , in the field of what is today known as numerical analysis.
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Jeremiah Horrocks
1618 - 1641 (23 years)
Jeremiah Horrocks , sometimes given as Jeremiah Horrox , was an English astronomer. He was the first person to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit; and he was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639, an event which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record. Most remarkably, Horrocks correctly asserted that Jupiter was accelerating in its orbit while Saturn was slowing and interpreted this as due to mutual gravitational interaction, thereby demonstrating that gravity's actions were not limited to the Ear...
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Ferdinand Kurlbaum
1857 - 1927 (70 years)
Ferdinand Kurlbaum was a German physicist. Life and work As the son of a magistrate, he had to follow his frequently transferred father. Problems at school were the result, and it wasn't until he was 23 that he graduated from high school. He studied mathematics and physics in Heidelberg and Berlin with Hermann Helmholtz. In 1887, he completed his dissertation on Determining the wavelength of Fraunhofer lines'.
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Karl Zimmer
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Karl Günter Zimmer , PhD, was a German nuclear chemist who is best known for his work in understanding the ionizing radiation on Deoxyribonucleic acid . In 1935, he published the major work, Über die Natur der Genmutation und der Genstruktur, with N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij, and Max Delbrück; it was considered to be a major advance in understanding the nature of gene mutation and gene structure. From 1945-55,, Zimmer was participated in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons but left Russia to eventually settle in Germany.
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Res Jost
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Res Jost was a Swiss theoretical physicist, who worked mainly in constructive quantum field theory. Biography Res Jost was born on January 10, 1918, in Bern. He is the son of the physics teacher Wilhelm Jost and Hermine Spycher. In 1949 Jost married the Viennese physicist Hilde Fleischer. Jost studied in Bern and at the University of Zurich, where he received his doctorate in 1946 under the supervision of the German physicist Gregor Wentzel. He then spent half a year with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, where he introduced the Jost function into scattering theory. Afterwards, he worked as an assistant of Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich.
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Ștefan Procopiu
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Ștefan Procopiu was a Romanian physicist and a titular member of the Romanian Academy. Biography Procopiu was born in 1890 in Bârlad, Romania. His father, Emanoil Procopiu, was employed at the Bârlad courthouse. His mother, Ecaterina Tașcă, was the sister of Gheorghe Tașcă . He attended the Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School in Bârlad from 1901 to 1908, continuing his studies at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Iași from 1908 to 1912. After graduation he became assistant to Professor Dragomir Hurmuzescu.
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John Napier
1550 - 1617 (67 years)
John Napier of Merchiston. , nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston. His Latinized name was Ioannes Neper.
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Erwin Finlay-Freundlich
1885 - 1964 (79 years)
Erwin Finlay-Freundlich was a German astronomer, a pupil of Felix Klein. Freundlich was a working associate of Albert Einstein and introduced experiments for which the general theory of relativity could be tested by astronomical observations based on the gravitational redshift.
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Benjamin Thompson
1753 - 1814 (61 years)
Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, FRS was a British physicist, born in Colonial Massachusetts, and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th-century revolution in thermodynamics. He served as lieutenant-colonel of the King's American Dragoons, part of the British Loyalist forces, during the American Revolutionary War. After the end of the war he moved to London, where his administrative talents were recognized when he was appointed a full colonel, and in 1784 he received a knighthood from King George III. A prolific designer, Thompson also drew designs for warships.
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Bonaventura Cavalieri
1598 - 1647 (49 years)
Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri was an Italian mathematician and a Jesuate. He is known for his work on the problems of optics and motion, work on indivisibles, the precursors of infinitesimal calculus, and the introduction of logarithms to Italy. Cavalieri's principle in geometry partially anticipated integral calculus.
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Stephen Gray
1666 - 1736 (70 years)
Stephen Gray was an English dyer and astronomer who was the first to systematically experiment with electrical conduction. Until his work in 1729 the emphasis had been on the simple generation of static charges and investigations of the static phenomena . Gray showed that electricity can be conducted through metals and that it appeared on the surfaces of insulators.
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Zhang Heng
78 - 139 (61 years)
Zhang Heng , formerly romanized as Chang Heng, was a Chinese polymathic scientist and statesman who lived during the Han dynasty. Educated in the capital cities of Luoyang and Chang'an, he achieved success as an astronomer, mathematician, seismologist, hydraulic engineer, inventor, geographer, cartographer, ethnographer, artist, poet, philosopher, politician, and literary scholar.
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Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann
1826 - 1899 (73 years)
Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann was a German physicist and scientific author. Life Wiedemann was born in Berlin the son of a merchant who died two years later. Following the death of his mother in 1842 he lived with his grandparents.
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Deng Jiaxian
1924 - 1986 (62 years)
Deng Jiaxian, or Chia Hsien Teng , was a Chinese nuclear physicist and academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was a leading organizer and key contributor to the Chinese nuclear weapon programs.
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Carl Wilhelm Oseen
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Carl Wilhelm Oseen was a theoretical physicist in Uppsala and Director of the Nobel Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm. Life Oseen was born in Lund, and took a Fil. Kand. degree at Lund University in 1897 and a Filosophie licentiat in 1900.
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Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner
1834 - 1882 (48 years)
Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner was a German astrophysicist who studied optical illusions. He was also an early psychical investigator. Biography From 1872 he held the chair of astrophysics at Leipzig University. He wrote numerous papers on photometry and spectrum analysis in Poggendorff's Annalen and Berichte der k. sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, two works on celestial photometry , and a curious book, Ueber die Natur der Cometen .
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Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji
1200 - 1204 (4 years)
Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji was an Andalusian-Arab astronomer and a Qadi in al-Andalus. Al-Biṭrūjī was the first astronomer to present a non-Ptolemaic astronomical system as an alternative to Ptolemy's models, with the planets borne by geocentric spheres. Another original aspect of his system was that he proposed a physical cause of celestial motions. His alternative system spread through most of Europe during the 13th century.
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Kotaro Honda
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Kotaro Honda, born on February 23, 1870, in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture – February 12, 1954initials from Kichiei Sumitomo Honda was born in the town of Yahagi Honda's research on KS steel in 1917, and on improved KS steel in 1934 became the basis for his position that Japan's industrial development is dependent on basic research in major scientific fields. He later improved upon the steel, creating NKS steel. NKS steel was mentioned by Taiichi Ohno in his book as being one of the Japanese materials whose development was tied to World War II. Honda, together with the academic Tokiatsu Hojo, setup up a research institute, which was supported by the Sumitomo family.
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Dominique, comte de Cassini
1748 - 1845 (97 years)
Jean-Dominique, comte de Cassini was a French astronomer, son of César-François Cassini de Thury and great-grandson of Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Cassini was born at the Paris Observatory. He succeeded his father as director of the observatory in 1784; but his plans for its restoration and re-equipment were wrecked in 1793 by the animosity of the National Assembly. His position having become intolerable, he resigned on 6 September and was thrown into prison in 1794, but released after seven months. He then withdrew to Thury, where he died in 1845.
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Heinrich Bruns
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Ernst Heinrich Bruns was a German mathematician and astronomer, who also contributed to the development of the field of theoretical geodesy. Early life Heinrich Bruns was born on 4 September 1848 in Berlin to Christian Gerhard Bruns, a landscape painter, and his wife, Caroline Henriette Hasse.
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Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin
1717 - 1783 (66 years)
Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin , Swedish astronomer and demographer. Wargentin was the son of the vicar of Sunne Wilhelm Wargentin and his spouse Christina Aroselia, and the great grandson of Joachim Wargentin , a Lübeck-born burgher of Åbo in Finland.
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