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List of the most influential people in Physics,

#12001

R. E. Siday

1912 - 1956 (44 years)

Raymond Eldred Siday was an English mathematician specialising in quantum mechanics. He obtained his BSc in Special Physics and later worked at the University of Edinburgh. He began collaborating with Werner Ehrenberg in 1933.

#12002

Helmut Volz

1911 - 1978 (67 years)

Helmut Volz was a German experimental nuclear physicist who worked on the German nuclear energy project during World War II. In the latter years of World War II, he became a professor at Erlangen University. He declined to take a position offered to him in the United States after the war, and he continued his teaching and research at Erlangen.

#12003

Frances Lowater

1871 - 1956 (85 years)

Frances Lowater was a British-American physicist and astronomer. Life and career Lowater studied in England for her undergraduate degrees, at University College, Nottingham, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She then moved to the United States, where she attended Bryn Mawr College and earned her Ph.D. in 1906. While studying for her Ph.D., she took a position as a physics demonstrator, and remained in that position until 1910. She spent a year at Westfield College and four years at Rockford College, then moved to Wellesley College, where she spent the rest of her career; with the exception of a...

#12004

Edward Victor Appleton

Edward Victor Appleton

1892 - 1965 (73 years)

Sir Edward Victor Appleton was an English physicist, Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in radiophysics. He studied, and was also employed as a lab technician, at Bradford College from 1909 to 1911. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1947 for his seminal work proving the existence of the ionosphere during experiments carried out in 1924.

#12005

Edgar Lipworth

1923 - 1977 (54 years)

Edgar Lipworth was an American physicist, specializing "in research in molecular and atomic beams, nuclear physics, lasers and the symmetry of physical laws under time reversal." Born and educated in England, Edgar Lipworth worked from 1944 to 1946 as a civilian research assistant on radar for the Air Ministry. After graduating with a BA from the University of Manchester in 1947, he became a graduate student in physics at Manhattan's Columbia University. There he obtained his PhD with advisor Willis Lamb with a dissertation on measurement of the Lamb shift in singly ionized helium. From 1953 to 1954 Lipworth held a fellowship with RCA.

#12006

Eni Njoku

1917 - 1974 (57 years)

Eni Njoku was a Nigerian botanist and educator. He was vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka . He served in the Nigerian House of Representatives as federal minister of Mines and Power, and was chairman of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria. He was an emissary at OAU-sponsored peace talks.

#12007

Edwin Francis Carpenter

1898 - 1963 (65 years)

Edwin Francis Carpenter was an American astronomer. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and received his A.B. and A.M. from Harvard University. In 1925 he was awarded a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley. He became an instructor at the University of Arizona, and by 1936 he was heading up the Astronomy Department. In 1938 he became directory of Steward Observatory, remaining in that post until 1963. He also served as Vice-president and chairman for the Astronomical Divisions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#12008

Eduard Shpolsky

1892 - 1975 (83 years)

Eduard Vladimirovich Shpolsky, also Shpolsk'ii, Shpolskii was a Russian and Soviet physicist and educator, co-founder and lifelong editor of Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk journal . Shpolsky primary scientific contribution belongs to the field of molecular spectroscopy, particularly luminescence and absorption spectra of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. In 1952 Shpolsky and his junior researchers A. A. Ilyina and L. A. Klimov discovered Shpolsky effect in organic compounds, a property that allows highly selective spectroscopic identification of substances that normally do not possess clearly defined spectral lines or bands.

#12009

Valerie Myerscough

1942 - 1980 (38 years)

Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.

#12010

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.

#12011

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.

#12012

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.

#12013

Arthur W. Conway

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.

#12014

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.

#12015

Jagadish Chandra Bose

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.

#12016

Pavel Cherenkov

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.

#12017

Charles Thomson Rees Wilson

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.

#12018

Alice Hall Farnsworth

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.

#12019

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...

#12020

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...

#12021

Vladimir Sukachev

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.

#12022

J. Hans D. Jensen

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.

#12023

Willem de Sitter

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.

#12024

Norman Hilberry

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.

#12025

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.

#12026

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.

#12027

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

#12028

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.

#12029

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...

#12030

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.

#12031

Carlos Varsavsky

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.

#12032

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.

#12033

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.

#12034

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.

#12035

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.

#12036

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.

#12037

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.

#12038

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...

#12039

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...

#12040

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.

#12041

Oscar P. Snyder

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...

#12042

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.

#12043

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.

#12044

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.

#12045

Daniel Frost Comstock

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 .

#12046

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.

#12047

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.

#12048

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.

#12049

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.

#12050

Apollonius of Perga

Apollonius of Perga

262 BC - 190 BC (72 years)

Apollonius of Perga was an ancient Greek geometer and astronomer known for his work on conic sections. Beginning from the earlier contributions of Euclid and Archimedes on the topic, he brought them to the state prior to the invention of analytic geometry. His definitions of the terms ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are the ones in use today. With his predecessors Euclid and Archimedes, Apollonius is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity.

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