Archive for physics
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1805 – Hamilton – bio
William Rowan Hamilton was born in 1805 in Dublin, Ireland and was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. In mathematics, he studied number theory and various forms of algebras, eventually producing an extension to complex numbers (combinations of real numbers and “imaginary” units that involve the square root of negative one) that is known as quaternions. [...]
1819 – Foucault – bio
Leon Foucault was born in Paris, France in 1819 and was a physicist. He is best known for his demonstration of the rotation of Earth under a swinging pendulum (now known as Foucault pendulums). He also gave the name “gyroscope” to another device he used to investigate the motion of the planet. In 1850, Foucault [...]
1918 – Feynman – bio
Richard Feynman was born in 1918 in New York, USA and was a physicist. He was one of the founders of quantum electrodynamics and invented a shorthand to show particle interactions now known as “Feynman diagrams”. In 1965, he won a Nobel prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro [...]
1902 – Dirac – bio
Paul Dirac was born in 1902 in Bristol, England. He was a mathematician and physicist who helped to develop quantum mechanics and discovered an equation that successfully predicted anti-matter. In 1928 he created the Dirac equation which provides a mathematical description of elementary particles that is consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. The equation [...]
1903 – Von Neumann
John von Neumann was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1903 and was a mathematician. He did work with logic, set theory, quantum theory and statistical mechanics. His work on fixed point theorems led others to later accumulate three Nobel prizes in the area. He was an expert in explosion hydrodynamics and worked on the “Manhattan [...]
1773 – Young – bio
Thomas Young was born in 1773 in England and made important contributions in several areas of physics and also did significant work in many other fields, including: music, Egyptology and physiology. Grimaldi collected some of the earliest observations of the diffraction, or bending of light as it passes an obstacle. Newton studied this, but concluded [...]
Physics of Superheroes
Welcome to The Physics of Superheroes By James Kakalios! – [physicsofsuperheroes.com] In The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition, Professor James Kakalios explains in a fun and accessible manner a broad range of physics, from Isaac Newton to the transistor — but there’s not an inclined plane or pulley in sight! Rather, all of the [...]
1887 – Schrodinger – bio
Erwin Schrodinger was born in Vienna, Austria in 1887 and was a physicist who made major contributions to quantum mechanics. The Schrodinger wave equation describes the state of an atom, including the electrons as mathematical waves. It was later demonstrated that Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and the wave function were describing the same thing. PRECURSOR: 1777 [...]
1623 – Pascal – bio
Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered so [...]
1885 – Weyl – bio
Born near Hamburg, Germany in 1885, Hermann Weyl was a mathematician whose work had a strong influence on both physics and number theory. He worked on combining general relativity and the laws of electromagnetism. He worked with Lie algebras, symmetry and created the first version of gauge theory which attempted to describe both electromagnetic and [...]
