Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger used the mathematical process of renormalization to rid the quantum field theory developed by Paul Dirac of serious incongruities with experimental observations that had nearly prompted the...

Biography of Anders Jonas Angstrom (1814-1874), a Swedish physicist who pioneered the field of spectroscopy. He was also well known for his work in mathematics and astronomy.

While growing up in the Soviet Union, Lev Landau was so far ahead of his classmates that he was ready to begin college at age 13. His parents noticed a particular gift for math in their young son, who was considered a prodigy. It came as...

Murray Gell-Mann is a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his contributions to elementary particle physics. He is particularly well known for his role in bringing organization into the world of subatomic...

Klaus von Klitzing is a Nobel laureate who won the award in 1985 for his discovery of the quantized Hall effect, sometimes referred to as the quantum Hall effect. Von Klitzing's discovery resulted from his work exploring a phenomenon...

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist who first observed the phenomenon of superconductivity while carrying out pioneering work in the field of cryogenics. An important step on the way to this discovery was his success in...

Joseph John Thomson, better known as J. J. Thomson, was a British physicist who first theorized and offered experimental evidence that the atom was a divisible entity rather than the basic unit of matter, as was widely believed at the...

Japanese theoretical physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga resolved key problems with the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) developed by Paul Dirac in the late 1920s through the use of a mathematical technique he referred to as...

Biography of Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788-1827), a French physicist best known for his pioneering work in optics.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an outstanding twentieth century theoretical physicist whose work was fundamental to the development of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with...

With his famous kite experiment and other forays into science, Benjamin Franklin advances knowledge of electricity, inspiring his English friend Joseph Priestley to do the same.

This biography of the physicist Richard Feynman surveys his contributions to the development of the atomic bomb as well as his work on quantum electrostatics.

This site is a mixture of a short biography and quotes on German physicist Max Planck.

A short biography, which includes quotes, of French physicist Louis Victor Broglie. Details the life and works of this remarkable individual.

On January 28, 1986, NASA Challenger mission STS-51-L ended in tragedy when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. On board was physicist Ronald E. McNair, who was the second African American to enter space. But first, he was a...

The integrated circuit fueled the rise of microelectronics in the latter half of the twentieth century and paved the way for the Information Age. An American engineer, Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit in 1958, shortly after he...

James Prescott Joule experimented with engines, electricity and heat throughout his life. Joule's findings resulted in his development of the mechanical theory of heat and Joule's law, which quantitatively describes the rate at which...

James Clerk Maxwell was one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. His theoretical work on electromagnetism and light largely determined the direction that physics would take in the early twentieth century. Indeed,...

FInd out about one of the leading figures in the history of thermodynamics, Bnejamin Thompson.

Find out about Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians in history.

Find out about the life and work of Gustav Kirchoff, who made contributions to the fundamental understanding of black-body radiation emitted by heated objects, spectroscopy, and electrical circuits.

Find out about the life and work of one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry, Svante Arrhenius, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate.

Interesting biographical information and achievements of Sir Isaac Newton, famous physicist, astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher.

German born Werner Heisenberg was a notable physicist who worked on numerous projects, including quantum theory.