- Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for expanding the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory. For his work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, …
- Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American physicist. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.
- Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe (pronounced "BAY-tuh"); (July 2 1906--March 6, 2005), was a German-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory developing the first atomic bombs. There he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons, …
- Alan Lightman
Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Princeton and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. An active research scientist in astronomy and physics for two decades, he has also taught both subjects on the faculties of Harvard and MIT. international best seller; Good Benito ; The Diagnosis , which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Reunion .
- Paul Ginsparg
Paul Ginsparg is a physicist widely known for his development of the ArXiv.org e-print archive. Since 2001, he has been a professor of Physics and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University. The pre-print archive was developed while he was a member of staff of Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1990-2001. He has been awarded the P.A.M. (physics astronomy math) Award from the Special Libraries Association, named a Lingua Franca "Tech 20", …
- Philip Morrison
Philip Morrison, (born 7 November 1915 in Somerville, New Jersey - died 22 April 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was Institute Professor, Emeritus and Professor of Physics, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Morrison grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated from its public schools. He earned his B.S. in 1936 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and in 1940 he earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, …
- Neil Gershenfeld
Let's start with the development of "personal fabrication." We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally outside the box, as we bring the programmability
- David Mermin
In solid-state physics, N. David Mermin is a polymathic physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin-Wagner theorem and his application of the term "Boojum" to superfluidity. Together with Neil W. Ashcroft, Mermin has written an esteemed textbook, "Solid State Physics", and numerous popularizations of physics and mathematics.
- Isidor Isaac Rabi
Isidor Isaac Rabi was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian-born physicist. Rabi was born in Rymanów, Galicia, Austrian Empire (now Poland), and was brought to the United States as a child the following year. He achieved a Bachelor of Chemistry degree from Cornell University in 1919, continuing his studies at Columbia University and received his Ph.D. in 1927. A fellowship enabled him to spend the next two years in Europe working with such eminent physicists as Niels Bohr, …
- Henry Tye
Henry Tye (born 1947) is a Chinese-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist most notable for proposing that a brane and an antibrane annihilated one another, causing cosmic inflation and his work on superstring theory, brane cosmology and elementary particle physics. He received his B.S. from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Sheldon Lee Glashow
Professor Sheldon Lee Glashow (born December 5, 1932, Brookline, MA) is an American physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University. Around 1960 Glashow put forward an initial theory of electroweak interactions, which Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam later developed. For this work the three won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics. Also, in collaboration with John Iliopoulos and Luciano Maiani, Glashow predicted the charm quark.
- Paul McEuen
Paul McEuen (born 1963 in Oklahoma) is an American physicist. He received his B.S. in engineering physics at the University of Oklahoma (1985), and his Ph.D. in applied physics at Yale University (1991). After postdoctoral work at MIT (1990-1991), he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He moved to Cornell University in 2001, where he is currently a Professor of Physics. He is one of the world experts on carbon nanotubes.
- Gerhard Herzberg
Gerhard Herzberg , PC , CC , FRSC , FRS ( December 25 , 1904 a March 3 , 1999 ) was a pioneering physicist and physical chemist , and Nobel Laureate in chemistry . Born in Germany , he fled to Canada in 1935, where he continued his distinguished scientific career. Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy .
- Mildred Dresselhaus
Mildred S. Dresselhaus (born Mildred Spiewak on November 11 1930 in The Bronx, New York) is an Institute Professor and Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dresselhaus received her undergraduate degree at Hunter College in New York, and carried out postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright Fellowship and Harvard University.
- Duncan J. Watts
Duncan J. Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, head of the CDG Collective Dynamics Group and author of the book "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age" (Norton, 2003). Starting in the fall of 2007 he will join Yahoo! Research, and will lead their research in human social dynamics. He holds a B.Sc in physics from the University of New South Wales, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University.
- Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum (born December 19 1944; Philadelphia, USA) is a mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants. The son of a Polish and a Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Feigenbaum's education was not a happy one. Despite excelling in examinations, his early schooling at Tilden High School, Brooklyn, New York, and the City College of New York seemed unable to stimulate his appetite to learn.
- Gerard O'Neill
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill (February 6 1927 - April 27 1992) was a U.S. physicist and space pioneer. Born in Brooklyn, he graduated from Swarthmore College in 1950, and received a doctorate in physics from Cornell University in 1954. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1954, with which he remained associated until his death. Dr. O'Neill's early research focused on high-energy particle physics; notably he invented the particle storage ring.
- Saul Teukolsky
Saul Teukolsky is one of the pioneers of numerical relativity—the subject that deals with equations involving general relativity using supercomputers. He was a graduate student under Kip Thorne at Caltech in the seventies. He is a coauthor of the influential Numerical Recipes series of books on scientific computing. Today his research group is at the forefront of numerical relativity calculations to predict signals from the LIGO and LISA experiments.
- William Higinbotham
William (Willy) A. Higinbotham (October 25, 1910 - November 10, 1994), an American physicist, is credited with creating one of the first computer games, "Tennis for Two". Like "Pong", its a portrait of a game of tennis or ping-pong, but featured very different game mechanics that have no resemblance to the later game. As the Head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he created it on an oscilloscope in 1958, …
- Michael Peskin
Michael Peskin is an American theoretical physicist. He was an undergraduate at Harvard University and obtained his Ph.D. in 1978 at Cornell University studying under Kenneth Wilson. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1977-1980. He is currently a professor in the theory group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Peskin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.
- Persis Drell
Persis Drell is an American physicist best known for her expertise in the field of particle physics. She is the research director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). As research director, she has overseen the BaBar experiment. Before coming to Stanford, she was a professor at Cornell University from 1988-2002. Persis Drell is the daughter of noted physicist Sidney Drell.
- John Robert Schrieffer
John Robert Schrieffer (born May 31, 1931) is an American physicist and winner, with John Bardeen and Leon Neil Cooper, of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory (for their initials), the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, but his family moved in 1940 to Manhasset, New York, and then in 1947 to Eustis, Florida, …
- Hubert Reeves
Hubert Reeves is a Canadian (Québécois) astrophysicist and popularizer of science. He has been a Director of Research at the "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" since 1965 and currently lives in France where he often speaks on television promoting science. Born in Montreal, Reeves obtained a BSc in physics from the Université de Montréal in 1953, …
- Roman Jackiw
Roman W. Jackiw is a theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallist. Born in Poland, Jackiw received his PhD from Cornell University in 1966 under Hans Bethe and Kenneth Wilson. He has been a professor at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics since 1969. Jackiw is famous for the discovery of the so-called axial anomaly, also known as Adler-Bell-Jackiw anomaly, also known as the Chiral anomaly. In 1969, Roman Jackiw and John Stewart Bell published their explanation, …
- Ted Taylor
Theodore Brewster Taylor, was a prominent Mexican-born American physicist and nuclear weapons designer. He was born in Mexico City, Mexico, the son of a daughter of a congregationalist missionary and a director of the YMCA. He spent much of his childhood in Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City. From 1943 to 1946 he served on active duty in the United States Navy. He received a PhD from Cornell University in 1954.
- William E. Gordon
William E. Gordon (born January 8 1918) is a physicist and astronomer. He is referred to as the "father of the Arecibo Observatory". Born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1953. He was a faculty member at Cornell University from 1953 - 1966. He joined the faculty Rice University in 1966, serving as Dean of Science and Engineering, Dean of Natural Sciences, and Provost and Vice President.
- Hassan Aref
Dr. Hassan Aref (b. 1950) is the Reynolds Metals Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Tech, and the Niels Bohr Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. Prior to joining Virginia Tech as Dean of Engineering in 2003-2005 Aref was Head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a decade from 1992-2003.
- Robert Coleman Richardson
Robert Coleman Richardson (born June 26, 1937 in Washington D.C.) is an American physicist. He attended Virginia Tech and received a B.S. in 1958 and a M.S. in 1960. He received his PhD from Duke University in 1965. He is currently the Floyd Newman Professor of Physics and Vice Provost for Research at Cornell University, although he no longer operates a laboratory. His past experimental work focused on the study of physical phenomena at very low temperatures.
- Ernest J. Sternglass
Ernest Sternglass , Ph.D., is Director, Cofounder, President, and Chief Technical Officer of the Radiation and Public Health Project. In 1963, Dr. Sternglass was invited to testify before the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as to how the exponential increase in strontium-90 in baby teeth caused by bomb-test fallout was associated with increased childhood leukemia.
- Richard H. Price
Richard H. Price is a leading American physicist, well known for his important work in general relativity. Price graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1960, and went on to earn a dual degree in physics and engineering from Cornell University in 1965. He earned his Ph.D. in 1971 from Caltech under the supervision of Kip Thorne. He has spent most of his career at the University of Utah, …
- Richard Dalitz
Richard Henry Dalitz (28 February 1925 - 13 January 2006) was an Australian physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics. Born Dimboola, Victoria near Melbourne, Dalitz studied physics and mathematics at Melbourne University before moving to the United Kingdom in 1946, starting his PhD research at the University of Cambridge. After two years he took up a one year post at the University of Bristol, and then joined Rudolf Peierls' group at Birmingham University, …
- Malcolm Beasley
Malcolm Beasley is a professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He is known for his research related to superconductivity. He has served on the Jan Hendrik Schön commission, where he helped determine that Schön fabricated his data. Beasley attended Cornell University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in engineering physics in 1962 and his PhD in 1968. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Tor Hagfors
Tor Hagfors (1930 - 17. January 2007) was a Norwegian scientist, radio astronomer, radar expert and a pioneer in the studies of the interactions between electromagnetic waves (radio waves) and a plasma. He was one of several theorists who developed the theory underlying incoherent scattering in the early 1960ies. Tor Hagfors was born in Oslo in 1930. He studied at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH), …
- David J. Thouless
David J. Thouless (born in 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland) is a condensed matter physicist and Wolf Prize winner. Thouless earned his PhD at Cornell University under Hans Bethe. He was a professor of mathematical physics at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1980. Thouless has made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, …
- Robert Sproull
Robert Sproull is a retired American educator, physicist, and US Department of Defense official. A graduate of Deep Springs College, Sproull studied English literature at Cornell University before taking a Ph.D. at the same university in physics. He began a promising and productive career as a physicist at Cornell and headed the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics (LASSP) and the Materials Science Center.
- Ernest Fox Nichols
Ernest Fox Nichols (June 1, 1869- April 29, 1924) was a U.S. educator and physicist. He was born in Leavenworth County, Kansas, and received his undergraduate degree from Kansas State University in 1888. After working for a year in the Chemistry Department at Kansas State, he matriculated to graduate school at Cornell University, where he received degrees in 1893 and 1897. He also studied at the University of Berlin and Cambridge University.
- George F. Carrier
George F. Carrier (born 1918 - died March 8, 2002) was a mathematician and the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Applied Mathematics Emeritus of Harvard University. He was particularly noted for his ability to intuitively model a physical system and then deduce an analytical solution. He worked especially in the modelling of fluid mechanics, combustion, and tsunamis. He received a master's in engineering degree in 1939 and a Ph.D. in 1944, from Cornell University.
- Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz
Ross Lomanitz was an American physicist. He was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Bryan, Texas. He graduated from high school at age 14. Lomanitz went on to earn his bachelor of science degree in physics from the University of Oklahoma and his doctorate in theoretical physics from Cornell University. He was the first graduate student of Richard Feynman. He attended to graduate school in the early 1940s at the University of California, Berkeley.
- Carl M. Bender
Carl M. Bender is Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his A.B. in 1964 from Cornell University, where he graduated summa cum laude and with Distinction in All Subjects. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D in physics from Harvard University in 1965 and 1969, respectively. Bender specializes in quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, black holes, global warming and theoretical physics.
- Emil Martinec
Emil Martinec is an American theoretical physicist born in 1958. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1979 and obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984. He spent the last two years of his graduate education at SLAC after his dissertation advisor, Michael Peskin, left Cornell for SLAC. He is currently a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. He is a specialist in string theory.