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National Medal of Science for Physical Science
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Harold Urey
Harold Clayton Urey (April 29, 1893 – January 5, 1981) was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 and later led him to theories of planetary evolution.
Urey was born in...
Peter Debye
Peter Joseph William Debye (March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye attended the Aachen University of...
Edwin McMillan
Edwin Mattison McMillan (September 18, 1907 – September 7, 1991) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate credited with being the first ever to produce a transuranium element. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951.
McMillan was born...
Edward Mills Purcell
Edward Mills Purcell (August 30, 1912 – March 7, 1997) was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery (published 1946) of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear magnetic...
Linus Pauling
Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists in any field of the 20th...
Willis Lamb
Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb and Polykarp Kusch were able to precisely...
John Bardeen
John Bardeen, Ph.D. (May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again...
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Chen Ning Yang
Chen-Ning Franklin Yang (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng) (born October 1, 1922) is a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He, together with Tsung-dao Lee,...
Robert Hofstadter
Robert Hofstadter (February 5, 1915 – November 17, 1990) was an American physicist. He was the winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Born in New York City, he entered City College of New York, and graduated with a B.S. degree magna cum laude in...
Eugene Wigner
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Jenő Pál; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian American physicist and mathematician.
He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic...
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (pronounced /ˈfaɪnmən/ FYEN-mən; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the...
Robert Burns Woodward
Robert Burns Woodward (April 10, 1917 – July 8, 1979) was an American organic chemist. He made many significant contributions to modern organic chemistry, especially in the synthesis and structure determination of complex natural products, and...
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, in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory...
William Walden Rubey
William Walden Rubey (December 19, 1898–April 12, 1974) was an American geologist.
He was born in Moberly, Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri, and in 1920 he graduated with an A.B. degree. During the same year he married Susan Elsie...
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Vladimir Zworykin
Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin (Russian: Владимир Козьмич Зворыкин) (July 29, 1888 – July 29, 1982) was a Russian-American inventor, engineer, and pioneer of television technology. Zworykin invented a television transmitting and receiving system...
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Jacob Bjerknes
Jacob Aall Bonnevie Bjerknes (November 2, 1897, Stockholm, Sweden – July 7, 1975, Los Angeles, California) was a Norwegian-American meteorologist.
His father was the Norwegian meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951), one of the pioneers of modern...
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Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe (German pronunciation: [ˈhans ˈalbʀɛçt ˈbeːtə]; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist...
George Kistiakowsky
George Bogdan Kistiakowsky (November 18, 1900 – December 7, 1982) (Russian: Георгий Богданович Кистяковский) was a Ukrainian-American chemistry professor at Harvard who participated in the Manhattan Project and later served as President Eisenhower's...
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Gregory Breit
Gregory Breit (July 14, 1899 – September 11, 1981) was a Russian-born American physicist and professor at universities in New York, Wisconsin, Yale, and Buffalo. Together with Eugene Wigner he gave a description of particle resonant states, and with...
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Jesse Beams
Jesse Wakefield Beams (born 1898 in Belle Plaine, Kansas; died July 23, 1977) was an American physicist at the University of Virginia.
Beams completed his undergraduate B.A. in Physics at Fairmount College, University of Wisconsin–Madison. He spent...
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Louis Plack Hammett
Louis Plack Hammett (April 7, 1894 - February 9, 1987) was an American physical chemist. He is perhaps best known for the Hammett equation, which relates reaction rates to equilibrium constants for certain classes of organic reactions involving...
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Francis Birch
Albert Francis Birch (August 22, 1903-January 30, 1992) was the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard University from 1949 to 1974. A geophysicist best known for his experimental work on the properties of Earth-forming minerals at high...
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Lars Onsager
Lars Onsager (November 27, 1903 – October 5, 1976) was a Norwegian–American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He had the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University.
Lars...
Luis Alvarez
Luis W. Alvarez (June 13, 1911, San Francisco, California – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. The...
John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. He is also known for having...
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Paul Doughty Bartlett
Paul Doughty Bartlett was an American chemist.
Paul D. Bartlett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and grew up in Indianapolis. He received his BA from Amherst College in 1928. After his graduation from Harvard with James Bryant Conant, Bartlett worked...
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Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky
Wolfgang Kurt Hermann "Pief" Panofsky (April 24, 1919 – September 24, 2007), a German-American physicist.
Panofsky was born the son of renowned art historian Erwin Panofsky in Berlin, Germany. He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton...
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John C. Slater
John Clarke Slater (December 22, 1900 - July 25, 1976) was a noted American physicist and theoretical chemist.
Slater studied at the University of Rochester, earning his B.S. in 1920. He went on to receive his Ph. D. in physics from Harvard...
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Allan Sandage
Allan Rex Sandage (born June 18, 1926 in Iowa City, Iowa) is an American astronomer. He is Staff Member Emeritus with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. He is best known for determining the first reasonably accurate value for the...
Robert H. Dicke
Robert Henry Dicke (May 6, 1916 – March 4, 1997) was an American physicist, who made important contributions to the fields of astrophysics, atomic physics, cosmology and gravity.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Dicke completed his bachelor's degree at...
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Saul Winstein
Saul Winstein (October 8, 1912 – November 23, 1969) was the American chemist who discovered the Winstein reaction, in which he argued a non-classical cation was needed to explain the stability of the norbornyl cation. This fueled a debate with...
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John Robert Schrieffer
John Robert Schrieffer (born May 31, 1931) is an American physicist and, with John Bardeen and Leon Neil Cooper, recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory , the first successful microscopic theory of...
Frederick Seitz
Frederick Seitz (July 4, 1911–March 2, 2008) was an American physicist and a pioneer of solid state physics. Seitz studied under Eugene Wigner at Princeton University, graduating in 1934. He, along with Wigner, came up with the concept of the Wigner...
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Maurice Ewing
William Maurice "Doc" Ewing (May 12, 1906 – May 4, 1974) was an American geophysicist and oceanographer.
Ewing has been described as a pioneering geophysicist who worked on the research of seismic reflection and refraction in ocean basins, ocean...
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Robert R. Wilson
Robert Rathbun Wilson (March 4, 1914 – January 16, 2000) was an American physicist who was a group leader of the Manhattan Project, a sculptor, and an architect of Fermi National Laboratory (Fermilab), where he was also the director from 1967–1978....
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Arie Jan Haagen-Smit
Arie Jan Haagen-Smit (December 22, 1900 Utrecht - March 17, 1977, Pasadena, California) was a Dutch chemist. He is best known for linking the smog in Southern California to automobiles and is therefore known by many as the "father" of air pollution...
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Kenneth Pitzer
Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer (January 6, 1914–December 26, 1997) was an American theoretical chemist and educator.
He received his B.S. in 1935 from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1937....
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Paul Flory
Paul John Flory (June 19, 1910 – September 9, 1985) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate who was known for his prodigious volume of work in the field of polymers, or macromolecules. He was a leading pioneer in understanding the behavior of...
Lewis Hastings Sarett
Lewis Hastings Sarett (December 22, 1917 – November 29, 1999) was an American organic chemist. He was born in Champaign, Illinois. Live in Laona, Wisconsin for a time. Attended high school in Highland Park, Illinois . He received a Bachelor of...
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Edgar Bright Wilson
Edgar Bright Wilson, Jr. was born on December 18, 1908 in Gallatin, Tennessee, and died in 1992.
Wilson was a prominent and accomplished chemist and teacher, recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1975, Guggenheim Fellowships in 1949 and 1970...
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Samuel Abraham Goudsmit
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (The Hague, July 11, 1902 — Reno, December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. He studied physics at the University of Leiden...
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Verner Suomi
American Verner E. Suomi (1915–1995) was the father of satellite meteorology. He invented the Spin Scan Radiometer, which for many years was the instrument on the GOES weather satellites that generated the time sequences of cloud images seen on...
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Frederick Rossini
Frederick Dominic Rossini (1899- 1990) was an American thermodynamicist noted for his work in chemical thermodynamics.
In 1920, at the age of twenty-one, Rossini entered Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and soon was awarded a full-time...
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Philip Warren Anderson
Philip Warren Anderson (born December 13, 1923) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson has made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism and high-temperature superconductivity.
Anderson was born in...
John Hasbrouck van Vleck
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (March 13, 1899 – October 27, 1980) was an American physicist and mathematician, co-awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electrons in magnetic solids.
Born in...
Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu (simplified Chinese: 吴健雄; traditional Chinese: 吳健雄; pinyin: Wú Jiànxíong, lived May 29 1912 – February 16 1997) was a Chinese-American physicist with an expertise in the techniques of experimental physics and radioactivity. Wu worked...
Carl Djerassi
Carl Djerassi (born October 29, 1923 in Vienna, Austria), is an American chemist, novelist, and playwright best known for his contribution to the development of the first oral contraceptive pill (OCP).
He participated in the invention in 1951,...
Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....
Lyman Spitzer
Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr. (June 26, 1914 – March 31, 1997) was an American theoretical physicist and astronomer best known for his research in star formation and for his promotions of telescopes in space and research into plasma physics.
Spitzer...
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George Eugene Uhlenbeck
George Eugene Uhlenbeck (December 6, 1900, Batavia, Dutch East Indies – October 31, 1988, Boulder, Colorado) was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist. In 1925, he and Samuel Abraham Goudsmit introduced the concept of electron spin, which posits an...
Victor Frederick Weisskopf
Victor Frederick Weisskopf (September 19, 1908 – April 22, 2002) was an Austrian born Jewish American theoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr. During World War II he...
Allan McLeod Cormack
Allan MacLeod Cormack (February 23, 1924 – May 7, 1998) was a South African-born American physicist who won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Godfrey Hounsfield) for his work on x-ray computed tomography (CT).
Cormack was...
Herman Mark
Herman Francis Mark (May 3, 1895 - April 6, 1992) was an Austrian-American chemist regarded for his contributions to the development of polymer science. Mark's x-ray diffraction work on the molecular structure of fibers provided important evidence...
Henry Eyring
Henry Eyring (born February 20, 1901 in Colonia Juárez, Chihuahua – December 26, 1981 in Salt Lake City, Utah) was a Mexican-born American theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates....
James Cronin
James Watson Cronin (born September 29, 1931) is an American nuclear physicist.
Cronin was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Cronin and co-researcher Val Logsdon Fitch were awarded the 1980 Nobel...
Val Logsdon Fitch
Val Logsdon Fitch (born March 10, 1923, Merriman, Nebraska, USA) is an American nuclear physicist. A native of Merriman, Nebraska, he graduated from Gordon High School and attended Chadron State College for three years before being drafted into the...
Nicolaas Bloembergen
Nicolaas Bloembergen (born Dordrecht, March 11, 1920) is a Dutch/ American physicist and Nobel laureate.
He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Leiden in 1948; while pursuing his PhD at Harvard, Bloembergen also worked part-time as a...
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Arthur Leonard Schawlow
Arthur Leonard Schawlow (May 5, 1921 – April 28, 1999) was an American physicist. He is best remembered for his work on lasers, for which he was awarded a 1981 Nobel Prize.
His mother, Helen Mason, was from Canada and his father, Arthur Schawlow,...
Edward Witten
Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics. He is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is a leading researcher in superstring theory and winner of the highest honor...
