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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#11201

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.

#11202

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".

#11203

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.

#11204

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...

#11205

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.

#11206

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.

#11207

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.

#11208

Alexey A. Petrov

Alexey A Petrov is an American physicist known for his theoretical research in the area of physics of heavy quarks. Petrov is a USC Endowed Chair in Physics and the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of South Carolina. Previously he was a professor of physics at Wayne State University. He is the first particle theorist in the State of Michigan to receive National Science Foundation's CAREER award

#11209

Emilio Segrè

1905 - 1989 (84 years)

Emilio Gino Segrè was an Italian-born American physicist and Nobel laureate, who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton, a subatomic antiparticle, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 along with Owen Chamberlain.

#11210

Robert Karplus

1927 - 1990 (63 years)

Robert Karplus was a theoretical physicist and leader in the field of science education. Early life Robert Karplus was born in Vienna, where he lived until the German occupation of Austria in 1938. He emigrated with his mother and brother to escape the Anschluss. After a six-month stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States and settled in the Boston area. He entered Harvard University in 1943 and completed his Ph.D at the age of twenty-one. His thesis under E. Bright Wilson was on microwave spectroscopy and included both experimental and theoretical work. He was recognized by t...

#11211

Leo Goldberg

1913 - 1987 (74 years)

Leopold Goldberg was an American astronomer who held professorships at Harvard and the University of Michigan and the directorships of several major observatories. He was president of both the International Astronomical Union and the American Astronomical Society. His research focused on solar physics and the application of atomic physics to astronomy, and he led many of the early efforts to study the Sun from space telescopes.

#11212

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.

#11213

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. ...

#11214

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.

#11215

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.

#11216

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".

#11217

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.

#11218

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.

#11219

Arthur H. Benade

1925 - 1987 (62 years)

Arthur H. Benade was an American physicist and acoustician, researcher, professor, and author. He is best known for his research on the physics of woodwinds and brass instruments, and for two books, Horns, Strings, and Harmony , and Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics . He was a professor at Case Institute of Technology , in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1952 to 1987.

#11220

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.

#11221

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.

#11222

Adriaan van Maanen

Adriaan van Maanen

1884 - 1946 (62 years)

Adriaan van Maanen was a Dutch–American astronomer. Born in Friesland, he studied astronomy at the University of Utrecht, earning his Ph.D. in 1911, and worked briefly at the University of Groningen. In 1911, he came to the United States to work as a volunteer in an unpaid capacity at Yerkes Observatory. Within a year he got a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he remained active until his death in 1946.

#11223

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.

#11224

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.

#11225

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.

#11226

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 .

#11227

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.

#11228

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 .

#11229

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.

#11230

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...

#11231

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.

#11232

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 .

#11233

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...

#11234

Michael Ovenden

1926 - 1987 (61 years)

Michael William Ovenden FRSE FRAS was a 20th-century British astronomer who was President of the Astronomical Society of Glasgow and Professor of Astronomy at University of British Columbia. Life He was born on 21 May 1926 in the Muswell Hill district of north London. His first degree was from Queen Mary College, London in 1947. He then went to Cambridge University where he received an MA.

#11235

Katharina Boll-Dornberger

1909 - 1981 (72 years)

Katharina Boll-Dornberger , also known as Käte Dornberger-Schiff, was an Austrian-German physicist and crystallographer. She is known for her work on order-disorder structures. Life Katharina Boll-Dornberger was born in Vienna in 1909 as the daughter of the university professor and Alice Friederike Schiff. She studied physics and mathematics in Vienna and Göttingen. She wrote her dissertation under supervision of V. M. Goldschmidt on the crystal structure of water-free zinc sulfate in Göttingen and handed it in in Vienna in 1934. Afterwards, she conducted research in Philipp Gross's lab in Vienna.

#11236

Max Jakob

1879 - 1955 (76 years)

Max Jakob was a German physicist known for his work in the field of thermal science. Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Jakob studied engineering at Technical University Munich, from which he graduated in 1903. From 1903 to 1906, he was an assistant to O. Knoblauch at the Laboratory for Technical Physics. In 1910, Jakob embarked on a 25-year career at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg, Berlin. During this time he founded and directed applied thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow laboratories.

#11237

Yaşar Önel

Yaşar Önel is a Turkish-born physicist who holds Swiss and American citizenship. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from London University in 1975. He worked at the Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom, and Neuchatel and Geneva Universities in Switzerland before joining the University of Texas at Austin in 1986. Then, he moved to the University of Iowa in 1988. He is a tenured faculty professor. of Physics at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA, USA.

#11238

Vladimir Rojansky

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Vladimir Borisovich Rojansky was an American physicist, author and educator. He was born in Bologoye, Russian Empire. His father was a railroad construction engineer and one of his grandfathers was a general.

#11239

Leona Woods

1919 - 1986 (67 years)

Leona Harriet Woods , later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb. At age 23, she was the youngest and only female member of the team which built and experimented with the world's first nuclear reactor , Chicago Pile-1, in a project led by her mentor Enrico Fermi. In particular, Woods was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation. She was the only woman present when the reactor went critical. She worked with Fe...

#11240

Carlo Franzinetti

Carlo Franzinetti

1923 - 1980 (57 years)

Carlo Franzinetti was an Italian experimental physicist. Personal biography Carlo Franzinetti was born in Rome, son of Guido Franzinetti, a music critic, and Ada Guastalla, a mathematician and linguist. He was married to Prof. Joan Rees.

#11241

Frances Pleasonton

Frances Pleasonton

1912 - 1990 (78 years)

Frances Pleasonton was a Particle Physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She was an active teacher and researcher, and a member of the team who first demonstrated neutron decay in 1951. Early life and education Pleasonton earned her bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College. She was an editor of the Bryn Mawr College yearbook. She went on to teach at Winsor School, Girls Latin School of Chicago and Brearley School. She returned to Bryn Mawr College for her master's degree, working as a warden at Pembroke East, and graduated in 1943. She was demonstrator-elect in physics and took a leave of absence for government service in 1942.

#11242

Heinrich Greinacher

Heinrich Greinacher

1880 - 1974 (94 years)

Heinrich Greinacher was a Swiss physicist. He is regarded as an original experimenter and is the developer of the magnetron and the Greinacher multiplier. Greinacher was the only child of master shoemaker Heinrich Greinacher and his wife Pauline, born Münzenmayer. He went to school in St. Gallen and studied physics at both Zurich, Geneva and Berlin. He also trained as a pianist at the Geneva Conservatory of Music. Originally a German citizen, he was naturalized in 1894 as a Swiss citizen. In Berlin, Greinacher attended the lectures of Max Planck and received a doctorate in 1904 under Emil Warburg.

#11243

Jean Chazy

1882 - 1955 (73 years)

Jean François Chazy was a French mathematician and astronomer. Life Chazy was the son of a small provincial manufacturer and studied mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure with completion of the agrégation in 1905. He received his doctorate in 1910 with thesis Équations différentielles du troisième ordre et d’ordre supérieur dont l’intégrale générale a ses points critiques fixes. In 1911 he was maître de conférences for mechanics in Grenoble and then in Lille. In World War I he served in the artillery and became famous for accurately predicting the location of the German siege gun which bombarded Paris.

#11244

Joseph Ashbrook

1918 - 1980 (62 years)

Joseph Ashbrook was an American astronomer. Life Ashbrook was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a doctorate from Harvard University in 1947 and taught at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, and at Harvard from 1950 to 1953. He started to work at Sky and Telescope in 1953, where he wrote the column "Astronomical Scrapbook" from 1954 to 1980, and remained on its staff until his death; he also edited the magazine from 1964 on.

#11245

Robert Raynolds McMath

1891 - 1962 (71 years)

Robert Raynolds McMath was an American solar astronomer. McMath was a bridge engineer, businessman, and astronomer. His father, Francis C. McMath, had made a fortune as a bridge builder. They both had a keen interest in amateur astronomy. So in 1922, the McMaths, along with Judge Henry S. Hulbert founded the McMath–Hulbert Observatory in Lake Angelus, Michigan. It was deeded to the University of Michigan in 1931, McMath served as the director of the McMath–Hulbert Observatory until 1961.

#11246

Reinhold Mannkopff

1894 - 1978 (84 years)

Reinhold Mannkopff was a German experimental physicist who specialized in spectroscopy. In 1939, he was a member of the first Uranium Club, the German nuclear energy project. After World War II, he was the secretary of the Northwest German branch of the German Physical Society for over 20 years.

#11247

Herman Zanstra

1894 - 1972 (78 years)

Herman Zanstra was a Dutch astronomer. Zanstra was born near Heerenveen in Friesland. In 1917 he graduated with an Engineer's degree in chemical engineering from the Delft Institute of Technology. While working in Delft for four years, the last two as a high school teacher, he wrote a highly theoretical and mathematical paper on relative motion which he sent to William Francis Gray Swann. Swann, then offered him to earn a Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics with him at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, which he did in two years time by expanding on his paper . After another year wit...

#11248

Max Planck

1858 - 1947 (89 years)

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. He is known for Planck's constant, which is of foundational importance for quantum physics, and which he used to derive a set of units, today called Planck units, expressed only in terms of fundamental physical constants.

#11249

Jane Dewey

1900 - 1976 (76 years)

Jane Mary Dewey was an American physicist. Early life and education Jane Mary Dewey was born in Chicago, the daughter of philosopher John Dewey and educator Alice Chipman Dewey. Her parents named her in honor of Jane Addams, an activist, sociologist and reformer; and Mary Rozet Smith, a philanthropist who was Addams's longtime companion.

#11250

Kalman H. Silvert

1921 - 1976 (55 years)

Kalman H. Silvert, was an author of works on democracy in Latin America, the first president of the Latin American Studies Association , and professor of political science at Tulane University, NYU, and other universities. The Kalman Silvert Award is LASA's highest award.

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