Name That Physicist!

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  1. 2. (BN) Stanford professor and American physicist \underline{\hspace{6cm}} developed the techniques and satellites which would take the first pictures of the Sun's corona using X-rays. His first graduate student would later be the first American woman to journey into space.
  2. 6. (BN) A German physicist who performed a series of experiments that demonstrated the wavelike nature of electromagnetism, he experimentally verified the theory of electromagnetism first laid out by James Clerk Maxwell. His efforts are immortalized as the SI unit for frequency bears his name, even though he could envision no practical application for his work at the time. He was also the first to observe the photoelectric effect, which was later explained by Einstein, earning him his Nobel prize.
  3. 8. (BN) Indian polymath, he was the first to propose Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics would not be sufficient to describe specific quantum systems. He sent his work to Einstein who translated it and published it for him in a German physics journal. This new model of quantum mechanics bear both his and Einstein's name, and his work was commemorated by Paul Dirac when Dirac named all subatomic particles with an integer spin after him.
  4. 10. (FN) The most ancient man on this list, he is regarded as one of the greatest scientists in classical antiquity. While he anticipated the invention of calculus almost 1800 years before it was discovered, physics students know him best for describing the relationship between the density of an object and how much fluid it displaces.
  5. 12. (LN) A Swiss mathematician, physicist, logician, and engineer who discovered so many ideas that they had to start naming his discoveries after his students to avoid confusion in the field of mathematics. He provided much of the mathematical notation we use today, and was the first to extend Newton's laws of motion to extended, rotating objects.
  6. 15. (BN) An English physicist with no recorded formal education, \underline{\hspace{6cm}} went on to become arguably the greatest experimental physicist of the 19th century. His study of electricity and magnetism resulted in the first electric motor, the discovery of electromagnetic fields, and laid the foundation for modern electrodynamics.
  7. 17. (BN) An English physicist who is credited with being the first person to establish electricity and magnetis as separate phenomena. He invented the first device for detecting electric charge on an object, and his "terrellas" allowed him to better document the Earth's magnetic properties.
  8. 18. (LN) New Zealand-born experimental physicist he is most famously known for his experiment which disproved the ``plum pudding" model of the atom. His work earned him the Nobel prize in chemistry, which infuriated him as he was a physicist, not a chemist. While it was often said he was a poor lecturer, his keen intuition for designing experiments helped steer several of his students toward Nobel Prizes of their own.
  9. 19. (LN) A French mathematician and theoretical physicist, he was widely considered the greatest mathematician of his time, working with equal prowess in all fields of mathematics that existed at the time. He is considered one of the founders of the field of topology, and he was the first person to propose the existence of gravitational waves. His work on the Lorentz transformation and Maxwell's equation provided a bridge which would eventually help lead Einstein to relativity.
  10. 23. (BN) A still-living Irish astrophysicist she discovered the first radio pulsars when she was only a graduate student. Though her advisor was extremely skeptical of conclusion that their data indicated the existence of pulsars, he had no problem accepting the Nobel Prize that came with the discovery, even though she herself did not receive one.
  11. 24. (LN) American and Hungarian physicist and mathematician that worked on the Manhattan Project. A multilinguist who axiomatized set theory and quantum mechanics, one of his colleagues remarked that he was so intelligent it might be evidence of humans evolving into a new species.
  12. 27. (BN) Discovered radioactivity and as well as two new elements. Trained x-ray technicians and ran a mobile x-ray unit during WWI. Also, the first person to receive two Nobel prizes.
  13. 30. (BN) An American astronomer whose study of the angular momentum of galaxies provided the first evidence for the existence of dark matter, she showed that galaxies should fly apart if they were only being held together by the gravity of the stars within them. This lead to the discovery of dark matter haloes whose outline could be observed using gravitational lensing.
  14. 32. (BN) A physician and physicist, he committed sacrilege by going against Newton and proving this theory of light wrong through his seminal experiment on light through two slits. He received so much hate for work that he eventually left physics and studied only medicine.
  15. 34. (ALL) A French noblewoman in the 18th century, Voltaire once said her greatest fault was being a woman. Her translated version of Newton's Principia became the standard in France, and she also proved Leibniz correct over Newton regarding the nature of energy in objects.
  16. 35. (BN) One of the most important physicists involved in the creation of quantum mechanics, he merged two separate theories at the time into a single unified framework. He was also the first person to apply Einstein's relativity to quantum mechanics and he predicted the existence of antimatter.
  17. 36. (BN) One of the few living physicists in this activity. He holds a special place in my heart, as his pioneering work on parity-time symmetry served as the influence for my senior thesis on transitions in two-particle quantum systems. As a mathematical physicist, his work has up-ended the longstanding paradigm that only Hermitian systems contain physically useful information, and the cover of his book on the subject was inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
  18. 37. (BN) American polymath who conducted seminal experiments regarding the nature of electricity. Came up with the "one fluid" theory of electricity and coined the terms "postive" and "negative" to describe the parts of that fluid.
  19. 38. (BN) Having an entire class of physics problems which bear his name, he was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. He was the chief architect of the first nuclear reactor, and at one point had to use the money awarded to him from receiving the Nobel prize to flee his home country of Italy as Mussolini began following in Germany's anti-semitic footsteps during WWII.
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  1. 1. (LN) An Indian-American physicist who is most recognized for his pioneering work on black holes, for which he shared a Nobel Prize in Physics. However, he mastered several fields in physics throughout his life, providing notable contributions to ballistics, stellar structure, and Brownian motion. MIT's X-ray observatory is named after him.
  2. 3. (LN) While most students know this German physicist through his contributions to circuit analyis, his work on thermal radiation and emission and absorption spectra of atoms provided driving questions whose solutions would lead to the discovery of quantum mechanics.
  3. 4. (BN) A prominent member of the Manhattan Project, This Hungarian physicist was the first person to develop the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. He patented the nuclear reactor along with an Italian physicist on this list, wrote the letter which would eventually secure Einstein's blessing for the Manhattan Project.
  4. 5. (LN) This French physicist did research in optics which would lead to the nearly unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light. He was the first to coin the term "polarization" in regard to light, and pioneered the physical understanding of light diffraction.
  5. 7. (ALL) Left partially deaf by a bout of scarlet fever as a child, this American physicist would create the modern system of star classification by cataloguing over 350,000 stars in her lifetime.
  6. 9. (BN) A Dutch physicist whose work created provided the foundation on which Einstein would later build special relativity. He derived an expression for the combined electromagnetic force acting on an object, as well as a set of transformations which were able to account for time dilation experienced by objects moving at high speeds.
  7. 10. (LN) A self-taught polymath, he was a product of his fathers belief in the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As such, he taught himself by reading books in the family library rather than attending a formal school. He derived a law relating the magnetic flux of a wire to the amount of charge current running through it, and the SI unit for current also bears his name.
  8. 11. (BN) Described by Einstein as "the most important woman in the history of mathematics." A German mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. One of the theorems bearing her name serves as the foundation for mathematical physics, explaining the connection between symmetry and conservation laws. Her mathematical insight was so profound that she was brought to Gottingen by David Hilbert and Felix Klein specifically to help physicists better understand general relativity.
  9. 13. (BN) German mathematician and physicist whose early accomplishments include proving the fundamental theorem of algebra. A prodigious figure in mathematical history, most physics students first encounter his name when study electrostatics. The law bearing his name related the amount of charge enclosed in an object to the flux of its electric field.
  10. 14. (LN) An Austrian physicist who was truly ahead of his time, he was a pioneer in the statistical treatment of thermodynamics. Considered just as excellent of a professor as he was a physicist, he first proposed that macroscopic phenomenon such as the speed of gas molecules at room temperature, could be explained using statistics. His ideas were so far ahead that the general physics community took decades to see the true value in what he had discovered.
  11. 16. (LN) a Bavarian physicist whose work on optical glass produced techniques for glass production which are still in use to this day. He developed the first spectroscope, and when he turned it toward the Sun he was baffled to see a rainbow broke with 574 dark lines, rather than the continuous rainbows we see here on Earth.
  12. 20. (LN) German mathematician and philosopher, he was a true polymath. He invented calculus independently of Newton, and was the first to relate integrals and derivatives through the fundamental theorem of calculus. In physics, he was the first to explain motion using the concept of energy, and his understanding of the relationship between space and time closely aligned with what we now know due to relativity.
  13. 21. (BN) Often first heard of in reference to his work in philosophy, he also had an immense impact on mathematics and physics. He created a coordinate system which merged the fields of algebra and geometry for the first time in human history, thus providing the framework upon which Leibniz and Newton would later create calculus.
  14. 22. (LN) A French physicist whose name is inscribed on the Eiffel tower, he is most famous for his eponymous law which serves as a first principle for electrostatics. To demonstrate his law, he invented the torsion balance, which was later used to determine the Earth's density and mass. He also did important work with friction, being the first to demonstrate sliding friction is independent of velocity.
  15. 25. (BN) A German theoretical physicist at the turn of the 20th century, he solved the "ultraviolet catastrophe" which paved the way for the birth of quantum mechanics. One of his professors tried to dissuade him from becoming a physicist by telling him that "In this field [physics], almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."
  16. 26. (LN) An American physicist who is considered the father of the space age he was a pioneer in the field of rocket science. At the time, he was heavily ridiculed by believing people could leave Earth, and the New York Times published a front-page article ridiculing his ideas. While he would not live to see the first rocket sent into space, the day after the success of the Apollo 11 mission, the New York Times printed a half-hearted apology admitting they had been wrong.
  17. 28. (BN) An English physicist who got his start running his father's brewery, he was a pioneer in the field of mechanical work and machine efficiency. He was the first to propose the idea of "work" as the mechanical equivalent of energy. Though his ideas would take some time to be fully accepted by the scientific community, they would lay the framework for the law of conservation of energy and the first law of thermodynamics.
  18. 29. (LN) This entry is for several people rather than just one, this family produced several mathematically gifted individuals who contributed significantly to the fields of mathematics and physics throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Most physics students first encounter this name when studying fluid dynamics for the first time, what is considered to be a statement of the conservation of energy principle for flowing fluids.
  19. 31. (BN) Another still-living physicist, he is best known for his work connecting ideas in music to the physics at the frontier of Einstein's theory of general relativity. He was largely motivated after discovering John Coltrane's mandala, which intricately links mathematics and the circle of fifths, which John Coltrane was inspired to create after studying Einstein's theory of relativity.
  20. 33. (BN) A 20th century Austrian and Swedish physicist who discovered the first evidence of Einstein's mass-energy equivalence principle. Her work on nuclear collisions proved the ideas of all her male colleagues incorrect an revolutionized our understanding of nuclear physics. and was robbed of a Nobel prize due to the political situation in Europe around WWII. Despite her indispensable contributions to discovering fission, only her male colleague was awarded the Nobel Prize for their work. She would go on to be nominated for the Nobel prize 48 more times without ever receiving it.