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• 
  

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  Germany
  Germany (ⁱ/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km² and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
  A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.
  
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  Islamabad
  Islamabad (Urdu: اسلام آباد Islām ābād, lit. Abode of Islam) is the capital of Pakistan and the tenth largest city in the country. Located within the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), the population of the city has grown from 100,000 in 1951 to 1.152 million in 2011. The greater Islamabad-Rawalpindi Metropolitan Area is the third largest conurbation in Pakistan with a population of over 4.5 million inhabitants.
  Islamabad is located in the Pothohar Plateau in the northern part of the country, within the Islamabad Capital Territory. The region has historically been a part of the crossroads of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with Margalla pass acting as the gateway between the two regions. The city was built during the 1960s to replace Karachi as Pakistan's capital. Islamabad is a well-organized city divided into different sectors and zones. It is regarded as the most developed city in Pakistan. Islamabad is ranked as a Gamma world city. The city is home to Faisal Mosque, the largest mosque in South Asia and the sixth largest mosque in the world.
  
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  Pakistan
  Pakistan (ⁱ/ˈpækɨstæn/ or ⁱ/pɑːkiˈstɑːn/; Urdu: پاکستان) (Urdu pronunciation: [paːkɪˈst̪aːn] ( listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Urdu: اسلامی جمہوریۂ پاکستان), is a sovereign country in South Asia. It sits at the crossroads of the strategically important regions of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. It has a 1,046-kilometre (650 mi) coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west and north, Iran to the southwest and China in the far northeast. It is separated from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor in the north, and it shares a marine border with Oman.
  The territory of modern Pakistan was the site of several ancient cultures, including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, and has undergone invasions or settlements by Hindu, Persian, Indo-Greek, Islamic, Turco-Mongol, Afghan and Sikh cultures. Thus the area has been ruled by numerous empires and dynasties, including the Indian Mauryan Empire, the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the Arab Umayyad Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Durrani Empire, the Sikh Empire and the British Empire. As a result of the Pakistan Movement led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and India's struggle for independence, Pakistan was created in 1947 as an independent nation for Muslims from the regions in the east and west of India where there was a Muslim majority. Initially a dominion, Pakistan adopted a new constitution in 1956, becoming an Islamic republic. A civil war in 1971 resulted in the secession of East Pakistan as the new country of Bangladesh.
  
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  Albert Einstein
  Albert Einstein ( /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
  Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.
  
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  Arnold Sommerfeld
  Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld FRS (5 December 1868 – 26 April 1951) was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and groomed a large number of students for the new era of theoretical physics. He was nominated a record 81 times for the Nobel Prize, and served as PhD supervisor for more Nobel prize winners in physics than any other supervisor before or since. He introduced the 2nd quantum number (azimuthal quantum number) and the 4th quantum number (spin quantum number). He also introduced the fine-structure constant, and pioneered X-ray wave theory.
  Sommerfeld studied mathematics and physical sciences at the Albertina University of his native city, Königsberg, East Prussia. His dissertation advisor was the mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann, and he also benefited from classes with mathematicians Adolph Hurwitz and David Hilbert, and physicist Emil Wiechert. His participation in the student fraternity Deutsche Burschenschaft resulted in a fencing scar on his face. He received his Ph.D. in 1891 (age 23).
  
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  Arthur Jaffe
  Arthur Jaffe is an American mathematical physicist and a professor at Harvard University. Born on December 22, 1937 he attended Princeton University as an undergraduate obtaining a degree in chemistry, and later Clare College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar, obtaining a degree in mathematics. He then returned to Princeton, obtaining a doctorate in physics.
  With James Glimm, he founded the subject called constructive quantum field theory. One of their major achievements was to show the mathematical compatibility of quantum theory, special relativity, and interaction. They did this by proving the existence of the first examples of non-linear, relativistic quantum fields with non-trivial scattering. Jaffe's work in several related fields of mathematics and physics is well-known, including contributions to gauge theory and to non-commutative geometry.
  For several years Jaffe was president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics, and later of the American Mathematical Society. He chaired the Council of Scientific Society Presidents.
  
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• Barry Simon
  Barry Simon (born 16 April 1946) is an eminent American mathematical physicist and the IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech, known for his prolific contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (particularly Schrödinger operators), including the connections to atomic and molecular physics. He has authored more than 300 publications on mathematics and physics.
  More particularly, his work has focused on broad areas of mathematical physics and analysis covering: quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, Brownian motion, random matrix theory, general nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (including N-body systems and resonances), nonrelativistic quantum mechanics in electric and magnetic fields, the semi-classical limit, the singular continuous spectrum, random and ergodic Schrödinger operators, orthogonal polynomials, and non-selfadjoint spectral theory.
  Simon became a Putnam Fellow in 1965 at 19 years old. He received his A.B. in 1966 from Harvard College and his Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton University in 1970.
  
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  Bernhard Riemann
  Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann [ˈʁiːman] ( listen) (September 17, 1826 – July 20, 1866) was an influential German mathematician who made lasting contributions to analysis, number theory and differential geometry, some of them enabling the later development of general relativity.
  Riemann was born in Breselenz, a village near Dannenberg in the Kingdom of Hanover in what is the Federal Republic of Germany today. His father, Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, was a poor Lutheran pastor in Breselenz who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. His mother, Charlotte Ebell, died before her children had reached adulthood. Riemann was the second of six children, shy, and suffered from numerous nervous breakdowns. Riemann exhibited exceptional mathematical skills, such as fantastic calculation abilities, from an early age but suffered from timidity and a fear of speaking in public.
  During 1840, Riemann went to Hanover to live with his grandmother and attend lyceum (middle school). After the death of his grandmother in 1842, he attended high school at the Johanneum Lüneburg. In high school, Riemann studied the Bible intensively, but he was often distracted by mathematics. His teachers were amazed by his adept ability to solve complicated mathematical operations, in which he often outstripped his instructor's knowledge. In 1846, at the age of 19, he started studying philology and theology in order to become a priest and help with his family's finances.
  
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• Bertha Swirles
  Bertha Swirles, Lady Jeffreys (22 May 1903 – 18 December 1999), carried out research on quantum theory, particularly in its early days. She was associated with Girton College, University of Cambridge, as student and Fellow, for over 70 years.
  Bertha Swirles was born in Northampton in 1903, attended Northampton School for Girls and then went up to Girton College, in 1921, to read Mathematics, graduating with first class Honours. She became a research student of Ralph Fowler, one of a distinguished company of his students that included Paul Dirac and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. She married Harold Jeffreys in 1940, and became Lady Jeffreys upon his knighthood in 1953.
  -rays, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Vol. 116, No. 774, pp. 491-500 (1927). [1] This paper dates from the time when Bertha Swirles was Yarrow Research Student at Girton College.
  
  
  
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  Carl Friedrich Gauss
  Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss ( /ˈɡaʊs/; German: Gauß  listen (help·info), Latin: Carolus Fridericus Gauss) (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physical scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.
  Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum (Latin, "the Prince of Mathematicians" or "the foremost of mathematicians") and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians. He referred to mathematics as "the queen of sciences".
  Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Braunschweig, in the duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, now part of Lower Saxony, Germany, as the son of poor working-class parents. Indeed, his mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension, which itself occurs 40 days after Easter. Gauss would later solve this puzzle for his birthdate in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years. He was christened and confirmed in a church near the school he attended as a child.
  
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  Carl Gustav Jacobi
  Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (10 December 1804 – 18 February 1851) was a German mathematician, widely considered to be the most inspiring teacher of his time and is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation.
  Jacobi was born of Jewish parentage in Potsdam. From 1816 to 1821 Jacobi went to the Victoria-Gymnasium, where he went to the senior classes right from the beginning, but still had to stay for several years. He studied at Berlin University, where he obtained the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1825, his thesis being an analytical discussion of the theory of fractions. In 1827 he became a professor and in 1829, a Tenured professor of Mathematics at Königsberg University, and held the chair until 1842.
  Jacobi suffered a breakdown from overwork in 1843. He then visited Italy for a few months to regain his health. On his return he moved to Berlin, where he lived as a royal pensioner until his death. During the Revolution of 1848 Jacobi was politically involved and unsuccessfully presented his parliamentary candidature on behalf of a Liberal club. This led, after the suppression of the revolution, to his royal grant being cut off – but his fame and reputation were such that it was soon resumed. In 1836, he had been elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  
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  Christiaan Huygens
  Christiaan Huygens, FRS (/ˈhaɪɡənz/; [ˈɦœyɣə(n)s] ( listen); 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a prominent Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist and horologist. His work included early telescopic studies elucidating the nature of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping, and studies of both optics and the centrifugal force.
  Huygens achieved note for his argument that light consists of waves, now known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle, which two centuries later became instrumental in the understanding of wave-particle duality. He generally receives credit for his discovery of the centrifugal force, the laws for collision of bodies, for his role in the development of modern calculus and his original observations on sound perception (see repetition pitch).
  Christiaan Huygens was born in April 1629 at The Hague, the second son of Constantijn Huygens, (1596–1687), a friend of mathematician, philosopher and minor physicistRené Descartes, and of Suzanna van Baerle (deceased 1637), whom Constantijn had married on 6 April 1627. Christiaan studied law and mathematics at the University of Leiden and the College of Orange in Breda. After a stint as a diplomat, Huygens turned to science.
  
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  Daniel Bernoulli
  Daniel Bernoulli (Groningen, 29 January 1700 – Basel, 17 March 1782) was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. Bernoulli's work is still studied at length by many schools of science throughout the world.
  Daniel Bernoulli was born in Groningen, in the Netherlands, into a family of distinguished mathematicians. The son of Johann Bernoulli (one of the "early developers" of calculus), nephew of Jakob Bernoulli (who "was the first to discover the theory of probability"), and older brother of Johann II, Daniel Bernoulli has been described as "by far the ablest of the younger Harpers". He is said to have had a bad relationship with his father, Johann. Upon both of them entering and tying for first place in a scientific contest at the University of Paris, Johann, unable to bear the "shame" of being compared as Daniel's equal, banned Daniel from his house. Johann Bernoulli also plagiarized some key ideas from Daniel's book Hydrodynamica in his own book Hydraulica which he backdated to before Hydrodynamica. Despite Daniel's attempts at reconciliation, his father carried the grudge until his death.
  
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  David Hilbert
  David Hilbert, FRS (German pronunciation: [ˈdaːvɪt ˈhɪlbɐt]; January 23, 1862 – February 14, 1943) was a German mathematician. He is recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of geometry. He also formulated the theory of Hilbert spaces, one of the foundations of functional analysis.
  Hilbert adopted and warmly defended Georg Cantor's set theory and transfinite numbers. A famous example of his leadership in mathematics is his 1900 presentation of a collection of problems that set the course for much of the mathematical research of the 20th century.
  Hilbert and his students contributed significantly to establishing rigor and developed important tools used in modern mathematical physics. Hilbert is known as one of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic, as well as for being among the first to distinguish between mathematics and metamathematics.
  
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• E. C. Titchmarsh
  Edward Charles "Ted" Titchmarsh (born 1 June 1899 in Newbury died 18 January 1963 at Oxford) was a leading British mathematician.
  He was educated at King Edward VII School (Sheffield) and Balliol College, Oxford, where he began his studies in October 1917.
  He was known for work in analytic number theory, Fourier analysis and other parts of mathematical analysis. He wrote several classic books in these areas; his book on the Riemann zeta-function was reissued in an edition edited by Roger Heath-Brown.
  He was Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford from 1932 to 1963.
  
  
  
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• E. T. Whittaker
  Edmund Taylor Whittaker FRS FRSE (24 October 1873 – 24 March 1956) was an English mathematician who contributed widely to applied mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of special functions. He had a particular interest in numerical analysis, but also worked on celestial mechanics and the history of physics. Near the end of his career he received the Copley Medal, the most prestigious honorary award in British science. The School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh holds The Whittaker Colloquium, a yearly lecture in his honour.
  Whittaker was born in Southport, in Lancashire. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge from 1892. He graduated as Second Wrangler in the examination in 1895 and also received the Tyson Medal for Mathematics and Astronomy. In 1896, Whittaker was elected as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained at Cambridge as a teacher until 1906. Between 1906 and 1911 he was the Royal Astronomer of Ireland and professor of astronomy at Trinity College Dublin where he taught mathematical physics. In 1911 Whittaker became professor at Edinburgh University and remained there for the rest of his career.
  
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  Edward Witten
  Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently a professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.
  Witten is a researcher in superstring theory, a theory of quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories and other areas of mathematical physics.
  He has made contributions in mathematics and helped bridge gaps between fundamental physics and various areas of mathematics. In 1990 he was the world's first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Union of Mathematics. In 2004, Time magazine stated that Witten was widely thought to be the world's greatest living theoretical physicist.
  Witten was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the son of Lorraine W. Witten and Louis Witten, a theoretical physicist specializing in gravitation and general relativity.
  Witten attended the Park School of Baltimore (class of '68), and received his Bachelor of Arts with a major in history and minor in linguistics from Brandeis University in 1971. He published articles in The New Republic and The Nation. In 1968 Witten published an article in The Nation arguing that the New Left had no strategy. He worked briefly for George McGovern, a Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern lost the election in a landslide to Richard Nixon.
  
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  Erwin Schrödinger
  Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger ( /ˈʃroʊdɪŋər/; German: [ˈɛʁviːn ˈʃʁøːdɪŋɐ]; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961) was an Austrian born physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. In 1935 he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.
  In 1887 Schrödinger was born in Vienna, Austria to Rudolf Schrödinger (cerecloth producer, botanist) and Georgine Emilia Brenda (daughter of Alexander Bauer, Professor of Chemistry, Technische Hochschule Vienna).
  His mother was half Austrian and half English; His father was Catholic and his mother was Lutheran. Despite having a religious background, he was later said to be an atheist.
  In 1898 he attended the Akademisches Gymnasium. Between 1906 and 1910 Schrödinger studied in Vienna under Franz Serafin Exner(1849–1926) and Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874–1915). He also conducted experimental work with Karl Wilhelm Friedrich "Fritz" Kohlrausch 1884–1953.
  
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  Euler
  Leonhard Euler (German pronunciation: [ˈɔʏlɐ], ( Swiss German pronunciation (help·info)) ( Standard German pronunciation (help·info)) English approximation, "Oiler"; 15 April 1707 – 18 September 1783) was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a mathematical function. He is also renowned for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy.
  Euler spent most of his adult life in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Berlin, Prussia. He is considered to be the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century, and one of the greatest of all time. He is also one of the most prolific mathematicians ever; his collected works fill 60–80 quarto volumes. A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all."
  
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  Freeman Dyson
  Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Dyson has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for over fifty years.
  Dyson's father was the English composer Sir George Dyson; his mother was trained as a lawyer but after Dyson was born worked as a social worker. Despite sharing a last name, he is not related to the early 20th century astronomer Frank Watson Dyson, but as a small boy Freeman Dyson was aware of Frank Watson Dyson. Freeman credits the popularity of an astronomer with the same last name as having inadvertently helped to spark his interest in science.^{[citation needed]}
  Dyson has six children, two of them (Esther and George) with his first wife, mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, and the other four with his second wife, Imme Dyson, a masters runner who married him in 1958. Due to issues with some of his children not being recognized as British citizens he abjured his allegiance to Britain, and became a naturalized American citizen.
  
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• G. N. Watson
  (George) Neville Watson (31 January 1886 – 2 February 1965) was an English mathematician, a noted master in the application of complex analysis to the theory of special functions. His collaboration on the 1915 second edition of E. T. Whittaker's A Course of Modern Analysis (1902) produced the classic “Whittaker & Watson” text. In 1918 he proved a significant result known as Watson's lemma, that has many applications in the theory on the asymptotic behavior of exponential integrals.
  His Treatise on the theory of Bessel functions (1922) was a virtuoso display, in particular in the asymptotic expansions of Bessel functions. It also became a classic.
  He subsequently spent many years on Ramanujan's formulae in the area of complex multiplication, mock theta functions and class numbers, and for some time looked after Ramanujan's lost notebook. His interests included solvable cases of the quintic equation. He introduced Watson's quintuple product identity.
  He was educated at St Paul's School, as a pupil of F. S. Macaulay, and Trinity College, Cambridge. There he encountered Whittaker, though their overlap was only two years. He became Professor at the University of Birmingham in 1918, where he remained until 1951.
  
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  Gauss
  Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss ( /ˈɡaʊs/; German: Gauß  listen (help·info), Latin: Carolus Fridericus Gauss) (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physical scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.
  Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum (Latin, "the Prince of Mathematicians" or "the foremost of mathematicians") and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians. He referred to mathematics as "the queen of sciences".
  Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Braunschweig, in the duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, now part of Lower Saxony, Germany, as the son of poor working-class parents. Indeed, his mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension, which itself occurs 40 days after Easter. Gauss would later solve this puzzle for his birthdate in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years. He was christened and confirmed in a church near the school he attended as a child.
  
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  Harold Jeffreys
  Sir Harold Jeffreys, FRS (22 April 1891 – 18 March 1989) was a mathematician, statistician, geophysicist, and astronomer. His seminal book Theory of Probability, which first appeared in 1939, played an important role in the revival of the Bayesian view of probability.
  Jeffreys was born in Fatfield, Washington, County Durham, England. He studied at Armstrong College in Newcastle upon Tyne, then part of the University of Durham, and with the University of London External Programme. He then went to St John's College, Cambridge and became a fellow in 1914. At Cambridge University he taught mathematics, then geophysics and finally became the Plumian Professor of Astronomy.
  He married another mathematician and physicist, Bertha Swirles (1903–1999), in 1940 and together they wrote Methods of Mathematical Physics.
  One of his major contributions was on the Bayesian approach to probability (also see Jeffreys prior), as well as the idea that the Earth's planetary core was liquid. He was knighted in 1953.
  
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  Hendrik Lorentz
  Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (Arnhem, 18 July 1853 – Haarlem, 4 February 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He also derived the transformation equations subsequently used by Albert Einstein to describe space and time.
  Hendrik Lorentz was born in Arnhem, Gelderland (The Netherlands), the son of Gerrit Frederik Lorentz (1822 – 1893), a well-off nurseryman, and Geertruida van Ginkel (1826 – 1861). In 1862, after his mother's death, his father married Luberta Hupkes. Despite being raised as a Protestant, he was a freethinker in religious matters. From 1866-1869 he attended the newly established high school in Arnhem, and in 1870 he passed the exams in classical languages which were then required for admission to University.
  Lorentz studied physics and mathematics at the University of Leiden, where he was strongly influenced by the teaching of astronomy professor Frederik Kaiser; it was his influence that led him to become a physicist. After earning a bachelor's degree, he returned to Arnhem in 1872 to teach high school classes in mathematics, but he continued his studies in Leiden in addition to his teaching position. In 1875 Lorentz earned a doctoral degree under Pieter Rijke on a thesis entitled "Over de theorie der terugkaatsing en breking van het licht" (On the theory of reflection and refraction of light), in which he refined the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell.
  In 1881 Hendrik married Aletta Catharina Kaiser, niece of Frederik Kaiser. She was the daughter of Johann Wilhelm Kaiser, director of the Amsterdam's Engraving School and professor of Fine Arts, and designer of the first Dutch postage stamps (1852). Later Kaiser was the Director of the National Gallery of Amsterdam. Hendrik and Aletta's eldest daughter Geertruida Luberta Lorentz was to become a physicist as well.
  
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  Henri Poincaré
  Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) (French pronunciation: [ˈʒyl ɑ̃ˈʁi pwɛ̃nkaˈʁe]) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
  As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002–2003. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.
  Poincaré made clear importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.
  
  wn.com/Henri_Poincaré
• Henry Margenau
  Henry Margenau (1901 - February 8, 1997) was a German-U.S. physicist, and philosopher of science.
  Born in Bielefeld, Germany, Margenau obtained his bachelor's degree from Midland Lutheran College, Nebraska before his M.Sc. from the University of Nebraska in 1926, and PhD from Yale University in 1929.
  Margenau worked on the theory of microwaves and the development of duplexing systems that enabled a single radar antenna both to transmit and receive signals. He also worked on spectral line broadening, a technique used to analyse and review the dynamics of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
  Margenau wrote extensively on science, his works including: Ethics and Science, The Nature of Physical Reality, Quantum Mechanics and Integrative Principles of Modern Thought.
  In 1968, Margenau was invited to give the Wimmer Lecture at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. His topic was Scientific Indeterminism and Human Freedom. Margenau embraced indeterminism as the first step toward a solution of the problem of human freedom.
  
  wn.com/Henry_Margenau
• Herman Feshbach
  Herman Feshbach (February 2, 1917, in New York City — 22 December, 2000, in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American physicist. He was an Institute Professor Emeritus of physics at MIT. Feshbach is best known for Feshbach resonance and for writing, with Philip M. Morse, Methods of Theoretical Physics.
  Feshbach was born in New York City and graduated from the City College of New York in 1937. He then went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1942.
  Feshbach was invited to stay at MIT after he received his doctorate. He remained on the physics faculty for over fifty years. From 1967 to 1973, he was the director of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics, and from 1973 to 1983, he was chairman of the physics department. In 1983, Feshbach was named as an Institute Professor, the highest faculty honor at MIT.
  Prof. Feshbach was active in the nuclear disarmament movement and was a founder and first chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. In 1969, he participated in a protest against military research at MIT.
  
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  Hermann Weyl
  Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl FRS (9 November 1885 – 8 December 1955) was a German mathematician and theoretical physicist. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland and then Princeton, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. His research has had major significance for theoretical physics as well as purely mathematical disciplines including number theory. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, and an important member of the Institute for Advanced Study during its early years.
  Weyl published technical and some general works on space, time, matter, philosophy, logic, symmetry and the history of mathematics. He was one of the first to conceive of combining general relativity with the laws of electromagnetism. While no mathematician of his generation aspired to the 'universalism' of Henri Poincaré or Hilbert, Weyl came as close as anyone. Michael Atiyah, in particular, has commented that whenever he examined a mathematical topic, he found that Weyl had preceded him (The Mathematical Intelligencer (1984), vol.6 no.1).
  
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  Hideki Yukawa
  Hideki Yukawa FRSFRSE (湯川 秀樹, Yukawa Hideki^?, 23 January 1907 – 8 September 1981), was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate.
  Yukawa was born in Tokyo and grew up in Kyoto. In 1929, after receiving his degree from Kyoto Imperial University, he stayed on as a lecturer for four years. After graduation, he was interested in theoretical physics, particularly in the theory of elementary particles. In 1932, he married Sumi (スミ^?); they had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki. In 1933 he became an assistant professor at Osaka University, at age 26.
  In 1935 he published his theory of mesons, which explained the interaction between protons and neutrons, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles. In 1940 he became a professor in Kyoto University. In 1940 he won the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy, in 1943 the Decoration of Cultural Merit from the Japanese government. In 1949 he became a professor at Columbia University, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, after the discovery by Cecil Frank Powell, Giuseppe Occhialini and César Lattes of Yukawa's predicted pion in 1947. Yukawa also worked on the theory of K-capture, in which a low energy electron is absorbed by the nucleus, after its initial prediction by G. C. Wick.
  
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  Isaac Newton
  Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
  
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  James Glimm
  James Gilbert Glimm (born 24 March 1934) is an American mathematical physicist, and Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
  James Glimm was born in Peoria, Illinois, USA on 24 March 1934.
  He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1959; his advisor was Richard V. Kadison.. Glimm had significant stints at New York University, and at Rockefeller University, before arriving at Stony Brook University in 1989.
  
  He has been noted for contributions to C*-algebras, quantum field theory, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, scientific computing, the modeling of petroleum reservoirs. Together with Arthur Jaffe, he has founded a subject called constructive quantum field theory.
  James Glimm was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984. He won the National Medal of Science in 2002. Starting January 1, 2007, he is serving a 2-year term as President of the American Mathematical Society.
  
  
  
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  Jerrold E. Marsden
  Jerrold Eldon Marsden (b. August 17, 1942 in Ocean Falls, British Columbia, Canada, d. September 21, 2010 in Pasadena, California), was an applied mathematician. He was the Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Control & Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. Marsden is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
  Marsden earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics at the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1968. Thereafter, he has worked at various universities and research institutes in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. He was one of the founders of the Fields Institute in Toronto, Canada, and directed it until 1994; at the California Institute of Technology he was the Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Control & Dynamical Systems.
  Marsden, together with Alan Weinstein, was one of the world leading authorities in mathematical and theoretical classical mechanics. He has laid much of the foundation for symplectic topology. He had the Marsden-Weinstein quotient named after him.
  
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  Johannes Kepler
  Johannes Kepler (German pronunciation: [ˈkʰɛplɐ]; December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. These works also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
  During his career, Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, Austria, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to astronomer Tycho Brahe, and eventually the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He was also a mathematics teacher in Linz, Austria, and an adviser to General Wallenstein. Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting telescope (the Keplerian Telescope), and mentioned the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei.
  
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  John von Neumann
  John von Neumann ( /vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics, linear programming, game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history. The mathematician Jean Dieudonné called von Neumann "the last of the great mathematicians", while Peter Lax described him as possessing the most "fearsome technical prowess" and "scintillating intellect" of the century, and Hans Bethe stated "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man". Even in Budapest, in the time that produced geniuses like Theodore von Kármán (b. 1881), George de Hevesy (b. 1885), Leó Szilárd (b. 1898), Eugene Wigner (b. 1902), Edward Teller (b. 1908), and Paul Erdős (b. 1913), his brilliance stood out.
  
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  Julian Schwinger
  Julian Seymour Schwinger (February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.
  Schwinger is recognized as one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, responsible for much of modern quantum field theory, including a variational approach, and the equations of motion for quantum fields. He developed the first electroweak model, and the first example of confinement in 1+1 dimensions. He is responsible for the theory of multiple neutrinos, Schwinger terms, and the theory of the spin 3/2 field.
  Julian Seymour Schwinger was born in New York City, to a Polish Jewish family, who had immigrated to America. Both his father and his mother's parents were prosperous clothing manufacturers, although the family business declined after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The family followed the Orthodox Jewish tradition. He attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York as an undergraduate before transferring to Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D. (overseen by I.I. Rabi) in 1939 at the age of 21. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley (under J. Robert Oppenheimer), and was later appointed to a position at Purdue University.
  
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  Leonhard Euler
  Leonhard Euler (German pronunciation: [ˈɔʏlɐ], ( Swiss German pronunciation (help·info)) ( Standard German pronunciation (help·info)) English approximation, "Oiler"; 15 April 1707 – 18 September 1783) was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a mathematical function. He is also renowned for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy.
  Euler spent most of his adult life in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Berlin, Prussia. He is considered to be the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century, and one of the greatest of all time. He is also one of the most prolific mathematicians ever; his collected works fill 60–80 quarto volumes. A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all."
  
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  Lord Rayleigh
  John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, OM (12 November 1842 – 30 June 1919) was an English physicist who, with William Ramsay, discovered the element argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. He also discovered the phenomenon now called Rayleigh scattering, explaining why the sky is blue, and predicted the existence of the surface waves now known as Rayleigh waves. Rayleigh's textbook, The Theory of Sound, is still referred to by acoustic engineers today.
  Strutt was born in Langford Grove, Essex, and in his early years suffered from frailty and poor health. He attended Harrow School, before going on to the University of Cambridge in 1861 where he studied mathematics at Trinity College. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree (Senior Wrangler and 1st Smith's prize) in 1865, and a Master of Arts in 1868. He was subsequently elected to a Fellowship of Trinity. He held the post until his marriage to Evelyn Balfour, daughter of James Maitland Balfour, in 1871. He had three sons with her. In 1873, on the death of his father, John Strutt, 2nd Baron Rayleigh, he inherited the Barony of Rayleigh.
  
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  Max Born
  Max Born (11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Walther Bothe).
  Max was born on 11 December 1882 in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), which at Born's birth was in the Prussian Province of Silesia in the German Empire, to a family of Jewish descent. He was one of two children born to Gustav Born, (b. 22 April 1850, Kempen, d. 6 July 1900, Breslau), an anatomist and embryologist, and Margarethe ('Gretchen') Kauffmann (b. 22 January 1856, Tannhausen, d. 29 August 1886, Breslau), from a Silesian family of industrialists.
  Gustav and Gretchen married on 7 May 1881. She died when Max was four years old, on 29 August 1886.
  Max had a sister Käthe (b. 5 March 1884), and a half-brother Wolfgang (b. 21 October 1892) from his father's second marriage (m. 13 September 1891) with Bertha Lipstein.
  
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  Max Planck
  Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS, (April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist who discovered quantum physics, initiating a revolution in natural science and philosophy. He is regarded as the founder of quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
  Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor in Kiel and Munich; and his paternal uncle was a judge.
  Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig. He was baptised with the name of Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck; of his given names, Marx (a now obsolete variant of Markus or maybe simply an error for Max, which is actually short for Maximilian) was indicated as the primary name. However, by the age of ten he signed with the name Max and used this for the rest of his life.
  He was the sixth child in the family, though two of his siblings were from his father's first marriage. Among his earliest memories was the marching of Prussian and Austrian troops into Kiel during the Danish-Prussian war of 1864. In 1867 the family moved to Munich, and Planck enrolled in the Maximilians gymnasium school, where he came under the tutelage of Hermann Müller, a mathematician who took an interest in the youth, and taught him astronomy and mechanics as well as mathematics. It was from Müller that Planck first learned the principle of conservation of energy. Planck graduated early, at age 17. This is how Planck first came in contact with the field of physics.
  
  wn.com/Max_Planck
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  Michael C. Reed
  Mike Reed is the Bishop-MacDermott Professor of Mathematics at Duke University where he has taught since 1977. Originally best known for his collaboration with Barry Simon on an extensive series of widely adopted graduate texts, Methods of Modern Mathematical Physics (four volumes) published from 1972 to 1978, Reed has since worked predominantly in applications of analysis to biology.
  In 2007 a conference Applications of Analysis to Mathematical Biology honored Prof. Reed's sixty-fifth birthday; Prof. Simon was among the invited speakers.
  Reed earned his PhD at Stanford University in 1969, and has supervised 13 doctorates with six additional descendants.
  Four volumes written with Barry Simon:
  
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  Niels Bohr
  Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish pronunciation: [ˈniːls ˈboɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen. He was part of the British team of physicists working on the Manhattan Project. Bohr married Margrethe Nørlund in 1912, and one of their sons, Aage Bohr, grew up to be an important physicist who in 1975 also received the Nobel Prize. Bohr has been described as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.
  Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1885. His father, Christian Bohr, was professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen (it is his name which is given to the Bohr shift or Bohr effect), while his mother, Ellen Adler Bohr, came from a wealthy Jewish family prominent in Danish banking and parliamentary circles (in 1891, Bohr was baptized a Lutheran, his father's religion).Despite having a religious background, he later became an atheist.His brother was Harald Bohr, a mathematician and Olympic footballer who played on the Danish national team. Niels Bohr was a passionate footballer as well, and the two brothers played a number of matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub, with Niels in goal.
  
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  Paul Dirac
  
  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS ( /dɪˈræk/ di-RAK; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was a member of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami, and spent the last decade of his life at Florida State University.
  Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation, which describes the behaviour of fermions, and predicted the existence of antimatter.
  Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."
  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents' home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland, who worked in Bristol as a French teacher. His mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, the daughter of a ship's captain, was born in Cornwall and worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library. Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who committed suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: "My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much. /.../ I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew."
  
  wn.com/Paul_Dirac
• Philip M. Morse
  Philip McCord Morse (August 6, 1903, Shreveport, Louisiana – 5 September 1985, Concord, Massachusetts), was an American physicist, administrator and pioneer of operations research (OR) in World War II. He is considered to be the father of operations research in the U.S.
  Morse graduated from the Case School of Applied Science in 1926 with a B.S. in physics. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1929. In 1930, he was granted an International Fellowship, which he used to do postgraduate study and research at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld during the winter of 1930 to the spring of 1931.
  From the spring through the summer of 1931, he was at Cambridge University. Upon return to the United States, he joined the faculty of MIT.
  In 1949 he was named the first Research Director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), an organization founded to conduct studies for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he served a year and a half before returning to MIT in the summer of 1950. In 1956 he launched MIT’s Operations Research Center, directing it until 1968, and awarding the first Ph.D. in OR in the U.S. to John Little.
  
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  Pierre-Simon Laplace
  Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (/ləˈplɑːs/; 23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827) was a French mathematician and astronomer whose work was pivotal to the development of mathematical astronomy and statistics. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five volume Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics) (1799–1825). This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the so-called Bayesian interpretation of probability was mainly developed by Laplace.
  Laplace formulated Laplace's equation, and pioneered the Laplace transform which appears in many branches of mathematical physics, a field that he took a leading role in forming. The Laplacian differential operator, widely used in mathematics, is also named after him. He restated and developed the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system and was one of the first scientists to postulate the existence of black holes and the notion of gravitational collapse.
  
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  Richard Courant
  Richard Courant (January 8, 1888 – January 27, 1972) was a German American mathematician.
  Courant was born in Lublinitz in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. During his youth, his parents had to move quite often, to Glatz, Breslau, and in 1905 to Berlin. He stayed in Breslau and entered the university there. As he found the courses not demanding enough, he continued his studies in Zürich and Göttingen. Courant eventually became David Hilbert's assistant in Göttingen and obtained his doctorate there in 1910. He had to fight in World War I, but he was wounded and dismissed from the military service shortly after enlisting. After the war, in 1919, he married Nerina (Nina) Runge, a daughter of the Göttingen professor for Applied Mathematics, Carl Runge. Richard continued his research in Göttingen, with a two-year period as professor in Münster. There he founded the Mathematical Institute, which he headed as director from 1928 until 1933.
  Courant left Germany in 1933, earlier than many of his colleagues. While he was classified as a Jew by the Nazis, his having served as a front-line soldier exempted him from losing his position for this particular reason at the time; however, his public membership in the social-democratic left was a reason for dismissal to which no such exemption applied.[1]
  
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  Richard Feynman
  Richard Phillips Feynman ( /ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.
  He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Feynman
• Robert Geroch
  Robert Geroch is a theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He has worked prominently on general relativity and mathematical physics and has promoted the use of category theory in mathematics and physics. He was the Ph.D. supervisor for Abhay Ashtekar.
  Geroch obtained his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1967 under the supervision of John Archibald Wheeler.
  
  
  
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  Roger Penrose
  Sir Roger Penrose OM, FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the universe. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.
  He was born in Colchester, Essex, England, Roger Penrose is a son of Lionel S. Penrose and Margaret Leathes. Penrose is the brother of mathematician Oliver Penrose and of chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Penrose attended University College School and University College, London, where he graduated with a first class degree in mathematics. In 1955, while still a student, Penrose reintroduced the E. H. Moore generalized matrix inverse, also known as the Moore–Penrose inverse, after it had been reinvented by Arne Bjerhammar (1951). Penrose earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge (St John's College) in 1958, writing a thesis on "tensor methods in algebraic geometry" under algebraist and geometer John A. Todd. He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form" and exchanged material with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. Escher's Waterfall, and Ascending and Descending were in turn inspired by Penrose. As reviewer Manjit Kumar puts it:
  
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  Rudolf Haag
  Rudolf Haag (* 17 August 1922 in Tübingen, Germany) is a German physicist. He is best known for his contributions to the algebraic formulation of axiomatic quantum field theory, namely the Haag-Kastler axioms , and a central no-go theorem in QFT, Haag's theorem, which demonstrates the nonexistence of a unitary^{[disambiguation needed ]}time-evolution operator in the interaction picture.
  Haag studied Physics at Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, now the University of Stuttgart, from 1948 to 1954 and then worked on his dissertation in Munich. His supervisor was Fritz Bopp. From 1956 to 1957 he was at Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. After doing one year each as visiting professor at Princeton University and University of Marseille, he was professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for six years until 1966.
  After that and until his retirement he held a chair for theoretical physics at the University of Hamburg.
  In 1965 he founded the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics, which he guided as Chief Editor for eight years.
  
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  Satyendra Nath Bose
  Prof. Satyendra Nath Bose (Bengali: সত্যেন্দ্র নাথ বসু Shottendronath Boshū, IPA: [ʃot̪ːend̪ronat̪ʰ boʃu]; 1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian mathematician and physicist noted for his collaboration with Albert Einstein in developing a theory regarding the gaslike qualities of electromagnetic radiation. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. He is honoured as the namesake of the boson. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India.
  Bose’s numerous scientific papers (published from 1918 to 1956) contributed to statistical mechanics, the electromagnetic properties of the ionosphere, the theories of X-ray crystallography and thermoluminescence, and unified field theory. Bose’s Planck’s Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta (1924) led Einstein to seek him out for collaboration.
  
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  Schrödinger
  Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger ( /ˈʃroʊdɪŋər/; German: [ˈɛʁviːn ˈʃʁøːdɪŋɐ]; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961) was an Austrian born physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. In 1935 he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.
  In 1887 Schrödinger was born in Vienna, Austria to Rudolf Schrödinger (cerecloth producer, botanist) and Georgine Emilia Brenda (daughter of Alexander Bauer, Professor of Chemistry, Technische Hochschule Vienna).
  His mother was half Austrian and half English; His father was Catholic and his mother was Lutheran. Despite having a religious background, he was later said to be an atheist.
  In 1898 he attended the Akademisches Gymnasium. Between 1906 and 1910 Schrödinger studied in Vienna under Franz Serafin Exner(1849–1926) and Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874–1915). He also conducted experimental work with Karl Wilhelm Friedrich "Fritz" Kohlrausch 1884–1953.
  
  wn.com/Schrödinger
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  Siméon Denis Poisson
  Siméon Denis Poisson (French: [si.me.ɔ̃ də.ni pwa.sɔ̃]; 21 June 1781 – 25 April 1840), was a French mathematician, geometer, and physicist. He obtained many important results, but within the elite Académie des Sciences he also was the final leading opponent of the wave theory of light and was proven wrong on that matter by Augustin-Jean Fresnel.
  Poisson was born in Pithiviers, Loiret, the son of soldier Siméon Poisson.
  In 1798, he entered the École Polytechnique in Paris as first in his year, and immediately began to attract the notice of the professors of the school, who left him free to make his own decisions as to what he would study. In 1800, less than two years after his entry, he published two memoirs, one on Étienne Bézout's method of elimination, the other on the number of integrals of a finite difference equation. The latter was examined by Sylvestre-François Lacroix and Adrien-Marie Legendre, who recommended that it should be published in the Recueil des savants étrangers, an unprecedented honour for a youth of eighteen. This success at once procured entry for Poisson into scientific circles. Joseph Louis Lagrange, whose lectures on the theory of functions he attended at the École Polytechnique, recognized his talent early on, and became his friend (the Mathematics Genealogy Project lists Lagrange as his advisor, but this may be an approximation); while Pierre-Simon Laplace, in whose footsteps Poisson followed, regarded him almost as his son. The rest of his career, till his death in Sceaux near Paris, was nearly occupied by the composition and publication of his many works and in fulfilling the duties of the numerous educational positions to which he was successively appointed.
  
  wn.com/Siméon_Denis_Poisson
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  Sin-Itiro Tomonaga
  Sin-Itiro Tomonaga or Shin'ichirō Tomonaga (朝永 振一郎, Tomonaga Shin'ichirō^?, March 31, 1906 – July 8, 1979) was a Japanese physicist, influential in the development of quantum electrodynamics, work for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.
  Tomonaga was born in Tokyo in 1906. He was the second child and eldest son of a Japanese philosopher, Sanjūrō Tomonaga. He entered the Kyoto Imperial University in 1926. Hideki Yukawa, also a Nobel Prize winner, was one of his classmates during undergraduate school. During graduate school at the same university, he worked as an assistant in the university for three years. After graduate school, he joined Nishina's group in Riken. In 1937, while working in Leipzig, he collaborated with the research group of Werner Heisenberg. Two years later, he returned to Japan due to the outbreak of the Second World War, but finished his doctoral degree on the study of nuclear materials with his thesis on work he had done while in Leipzig.
  
  wn.com/Sin-Itiro_Tomonaga
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  Stephen Hawking
  Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein–Hawking radiation).
  He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009. Subsequently, he became research director at the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.
  Hawking has a motor neurone disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years. He is now almost completely paralysed and communicates through a speech generating device. He has been married twice and has three children. Hawking has achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Hawking
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  Tycho Brahe
  Tycho Brahe (14 December 1546 – 24 October 1601), born Tyge Ottesen Brahe, was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations. Coming from Scania, then part of Denmark, now part of modern-day Sweden, Tycho was well known in his lifetime as an astronomer and alchemist.
  In his De nova stella (On the new star) of 1573, he refuted the Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm. His precise measurements indicated that "new stars" (novae or also now known as supernovae), in particular that of 1572, lacked the parallax expected in sub-lunar phenomena, and were therefore not "atmospheric" tail-less comets as previously believed, but occurred above the atmosphere and moon. Using similar measurements he showed that comets were also not atmospheric phenomena, as previously thought, and must pass through the supposed "immutable" celestial spheres.
  Tycho Brahe was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build the Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements, and later Stjerneborg, underground, when he discovered that his instruments in the former were not sufficiently steady. Something of an autocrat on the island he nevertheless founded manufactories such as paper-making to provide material for printing his results. After disagreements with the new Danish king in 1597, he was invited by the Bohemian king and Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II to Prague, where he became the official imperial astronomer. He built the new observatory at Benátky nad Jizerou. Here, from 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by Johannes Kepler. Kepler later used Tycho's astronomical results to develop his own theories of astronomy.
  
  wn.com/Tycho_Brahe
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  Vladimir Arnold
  Vladimir Igorevich Arnold (alternative spelling Arnol'd, Russian: Влади́мир И́горевич Арно́льд, 12 June 1937 – 3 June 2010) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. While he is best known for the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem regarding the stability of integrable Hamiltonian systems, he made important contributions in several areas including dynamical systems theory, catastrophe theory, topology, algebraic geometry, classical mechanics and singularity theory, including posing the ADE classification problem, since his first main result—the partial solution of Hilbert's thirteenth problem in 1957 at the age of 19.
  While a student of Andrey Kolmogorov at Moscow State University and still a teenager, Arnold showed in 1957 that any continuous function of several variables can be constructed with a finite number of two-variable functions, thereby partially solving Hilbert's thirteenth problem.
  After graduating from Moscow State University in 1959, he worked there until 1986 (a professor since 1965), and then at Steklov Mathematical Institute.
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Arnold
• Walter Thirring
  Walter Thirring (born 29 April 1927) is an Austrian physicist after whom the Thirring model in quantum field theory is named. He is son of the physicist Hans Thirring, co-discoverer of the Lense-Thirring frame dragging effect in general relativity.
  Walter Thirring was born in Vienna, Austria, where he earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1949 at the age of 22. In 1959 he became a professor for theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, and from 1968 to 1971 he was head of the Theory Division and director at CERN.
  Besides pioneering work in quantum field theory, Walter Thirring devoted his scientific life to mathematical physics. He is author of one of the first textbooks on quantum electrodynamics as well as of a four volume course in mathematical physics.
  In 1969, he received the Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
  In 2000, he received the Henri Poincaré Prize of the International Association of Mathematical Physics.
  Walter Thirring authored Cosmic Impressions, Templeton Press, Philadelphia and London, in 2007, and in that book he sums up his feelings about the scientific discoveries made by modern cosmology:
  
  wn.com/Walter_Thirring
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  Werner Heisenberg
  Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. In addition, he made important contributions to nuclear physics, quantum field theory, and particle physics.
  Heisenberg, along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, set forth the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics, and its application especially to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.
  Following World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which was soon thereafter renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958, when it was expanded and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.
  Heisenberg was also president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
  
  wn.com/Werner_Heisenberg
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  Willard Gibbs
  Josiah Willard Gibbs (February 11, 1839 – April 28, 1903) was an American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His work on the applications of thermodynamics was instrumental in transforming physical chemistry into a rigorous deductive science. Together with James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, he created statistical mechanics (a term which he coined), explaining the laws of thermodynamics in terms of the statistical properties of large ensembles of particles. As a mathematician, he invented modern vector calculus (independently of Oliver Heaviside).
  In 1863, Yale University awarded Gibbs the first American doctorate in engineering. After a three-year sojourn in Europe, Gibbs spent the rest of his career at Yale, where he was professor of mathematical physics. Working in relative isolation, he became the earliest theoretical scientist in the United States to earn an international reputation and was praised by Albert Einstein as "the greatest mind in American history." In 1901 Gibbs received what was then considered the highest honor awarded by the international scientific community, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London, "for his contributions to mathematical physics."
  
  wn.com/Willard_Gibbs
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  Wolfgang Pauli
  Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after being nominated by Albert Einstein, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle," involving spin theory, underpinning the structure of matter and the whole of chemistry.
  Pauli was born in Vienna to a chemist Wolfgang Joseph Pauli (né Wolf Pascheles, 1869–1955) and his wife Bertha Camilla Schütz. His middle name was given in honor of his godfather, physicist Ernst Mach. Pauli's paternal grandparents were from prominent Jewish families of Prague; his great-grandfather was the Czech-Jewish publisher Wolf Pascheles. His father converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism shortly before his marriage in 1899. His mother, Bertha Schütz, was raised in her mother's Roman Catholic religion; her father was Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz. Pauli was raised as a Roman Catholic, although eventually he and his parents left the Church.
  
  wn.com/Wolfgang_Pauli

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