Pieter Zeeman was born on May 25, 1865, at Zonnemaire, a small village in the isle of Schouwen, Zeeland, The Netherlands, as the son of the local clergyman Catharinus Forandinus Zeeman and his wife, née Wilhelmina Worst. After having finished his secondary school education at Zierikzee, the main town of the island, he went to…

William Henry Bragg was born at Westward, Cumberland, on July 2, 1862. He was educated at Market Harborough Grammar School and afterwards at King William’s College, Isle of Man. Elected a minor scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881, he studied mathematics under the well-known teacher, Dr. E. J. Routh. He was Third Wrangler in…

H. David Politzer – Biographical  H. David Politzer did not submit an autobiography.

William Lawrence Bragg, son of William Henry Bragg, was born in Adelaide, South Australia, on March 31, 1890. He received his early education at St. Peter’s College in his birthplace, proceeding to Adelaide University to take his degree in mathematics with first-class honours in 1908. He came to England with his father in 1909 and…

Julian Schwinger was born on 12th February 1918 in New York City. The principal direction of his life was fixed at an early age by an intense awareness of physics, and its study became an all-engrossing activity. To judge by a first publication, he debuted as a professional physicist at the age of sixteen. He…

Born April 20, 1918, in Lund, Sweden. Parents: and Karin Högbom. Married May 23, 1944, to Anna Brita Rhedin. Three children: Per (1945), Hans (1947) and Nils (1953). Attended the Uppsala Gymnasium; Studied physics, mathematics and chemistry at the University of Uppsala from 1936 until 1942. Graduated in Stockholm 1944. Docent in physics that year.…

Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was born in Voronezh Region on July 28, 1904. His parents, Aleksei and Mariya Cerenkov, were peasants. He graduated from the Physico-Mathematical Faculty of Voronezh State University in 1928, and in 1930 he took a post as senior scientific officer in the P.N. Lebedev Institute of Physics in the U.S.S.R. Academy of…

Richard P. Feynman was born in New York City on the 11th May 1918. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained his B.Sc. in 1939 and at Princeton University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1942. He was Research Assistant at Princeton (1940-1941), Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University (1945-1950),…

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, on April 23, 1858, the son of Julius Wilhelm and Emma (née Patzig) Planck. His father was Professor of Constitutional Law in the University of Kiel, and later in Göttingen. Planck studied at the Universities of Munich and Berlin, where his teachers included Kirchhoff and…

Erwin Schrödinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, the only child of Rudolf Schrödinger, who was married to a daughter of Alexander Bauer, his Professor of Chemistry at the Technical College of Vienna. Erwin’s father came from a Bavarian family which generations before had settled in Vienna. He was a highly gifted man…