List of Agnostics - List - Science, Technology

Science, Technology

• Haroon Ahmed, British Pakistani scientist in the fields of Microelectronics and electrical engineering.
• Sir David Attenborough (born 1926), English natural history presenter and anthropologist.
• Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923): English engineer, mathematician and inventor.
• John Logie Baird (1888–1946): Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first practical, publicly demonstrated television system, and also the world's first fully electronic colour television tube.
• Robert Bárány (1876–1936), Austro-Hungarian otologist. For his work on the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus of the ear, he received the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), Eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.
• Richard E. Bellman (1920–1984), American applied mathematician, celebrated for his invention of dynamic programming in 1953, and important contributions in other fields of mathematics.
• Emile Berliner (1851—1929), German-born American inventor. He is best known for developing the disc record gramophone (phonograph in American English).
• Claude Bernard (1813–1878), French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur (now known as homeostasis, a term coined by Walter Bradford Cannon).
• J. Michael Bishop (1930–), American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus and was co-winner of 1984 Alfred P. Sloan Prize.
• Nicolaas Bloembergen (born 1920), Dutch-American physicist. Bloembergen shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Arthur Schawlow and Kai Siegbahn for their work in laser spectroscopy.
• David Bohm (1917–1992), American-born British quantum physicist who contributed to theoretical physics, philosophy of mind, neuropsychology.
• George Boole (1815–1864), English mathematician and logician. Best known for developing Boolean algebra. He has also been labeled a deist as well.
• Robert Bosch (1861–1942), German industrialist, engineer and inventor, founder of Robert Bosch GmbH.
• Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), Indian polymath: a physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist, as well as an early writer of science fiction. He pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent. IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science. He is also considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He was the first person from the Indian subcontinent to receive a US patent, in 1904. He also invented the crescograph.
• James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), American archaeologist and historian.
• Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974), Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. He is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book.
• Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1899–1985), Australian virologist. He is best known for his contributions to immunology. He received the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for demonstrating acquired immune tolerance and developing the theory of clonal selection.
• Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934), Spanish pathologist, histologist, neuroscientist. He is considered by many to be the father of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1996.
• Anton Julius Carlson (1875–1956), Swedish American physiologist.
• Wallace Carothers (1896–1937), American chemist and inventor. He is credited with the invention of nylon.
• Henry Cavendish (1731–1810), British scientist. He noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He is also known for the Cavendish experiment, his measurement of the Earth's density, and early research into electricity.
• Owen Chamberlain (1920–2006), American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his discovery, with collaborator Emilio Segrè, of antiprotons, a sub-atomic antiparticle.
• Francis Crick (1916–2004), Nobel-laureate co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who described himself as a skeptic and an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism".
• Marie Curie (1867–1934), Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity and she became the first Nobel laureate to win two Nobel Prize in two different sciences. She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.
• Heber Doust Curtis (1872–1942), American astronomer. He is best known for his participation in the Great Debate with Harlow Shapley on the nature of nebulae and galaxies, and the size of the universe.
• Charles Darwin (1809–1882), founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, once described himself as being generally agnostic, though he was a member of the Anglican Church and attended Unitarian services.
• Max Delbrück (1906–1981), German-American biophysicist. He, along with Alfred D. Hershey and Salvador E. Luria, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses.
• Paul Dirac (1902–1984): British theoretical physicist, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, predicted the existence of antimatter, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.
• John William Draper (1811–1882): American (English-born) scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with producing the first clear photograph of a female face (1839–40) and the first detailed photograph of the Moon (1840).
• Eugène Dubois (1858–1940), Dutch paleoanthropologist and geologist. He earned worldwide fame for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or 'Java Man'.
• Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), French sociologist, who had a Jewish Bar Mitzvah at thirteen, was briefly interested in Catholicism after a mystical experience, but later became an agnostic.
• Freeman Dyson (1923–), British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering.
• Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Jewish born theoretical physicist, best known for his theory of relativity and the mass-energy equivalence, .
• Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), Italian-American physicist. Best known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.
• Edmond H. Fischer (born 1920), Swiss American biochemist. He and his collaborator Edwin G. Krebs were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992 for describing how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch to activate proteins and regulate various cellular processes.
• Val Logsdon Fitch (1923–), American nuclear physicist. He and co-researcher James Watson Cronin were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.
• Howard Florey (1898–1968), Australian pharmacologist and pathologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Sir Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for his role in the making of penicillin.
• Lee De Forest (1863–1961), American inventor with over 180 patents to his credit. De Forest invented the Audion, a vacuum tube that takes relatively weak electrical signals and amplifies them. He is considered to be one of the fathers of the "electronic age", as the Audion helped to usher in the widespread use of electronics. He is also credited with one of the principal inventions that brought sound to motion pictures.
• Edward Frankland (1825–1899), British chemist. He was an expert in water quality and analysis, and originated the concept of combining power, or valence (chemistry), in chemistry.
• Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite.
• Jerome I. Friedman (1930–), American physicist. In 1968-1969, commuting between MIT and California, he conducted experiments with Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center which gave the first experimental evidence that protons had an internal structure, later known to be quarks. For this, Friedman, Kendall and Taylor shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
• Milton Friedman (1912–2006), American economist, writer and public intellectual, winner of Nobel Prize in Economics.
• William Froude (1810–1879), English engineer, hydrodynamicist and naval architect. He was the first to formulate reliable laws for the resistance that water offers to ships (such as the hull speed equation) and for predicting their stability.
• Dennis Gabor (1900–1979), Hungarian-British electrical engineer and inventor. Known for his invention of holography and received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Francis Galton (1822–1911), English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He is also a cousin of Charles Darwin.
• Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979), English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.
• Roy J. Glauber (born 1925), American theoretical physicist. He was awarded one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", with the other half shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch.
• Camillo Golgi (1843–1926), Italian physician, pathologist, scientist. He, along with Santiago Ramón y Cajal, won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their studies of the structure of the nervous system.
• David Gross (born 1941), American particle physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom.
• John Gurdon (born 1933), British developmental biologist. He is best known for his pioneering research in nuclear transplantation and cloning.
• Murray Gell-Mann (born 1929), American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
• Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian and popularizer. Gould called himself a "Jewish agnostic".
• Hans Hahn (1879–1934), Austrian mathematician who made contributions to functional analysis, topology, set theory, the calculus of variations, real analysis, and order theory. His most famous student was Kurt Gödel, whose Ph.D. thesis was completed in 1929.
• Alan Hale (born 1958), American astronomer, known for his co-discovery of the Comet Hale-Bopp.
• William Stewart Halsted (1852–1922), American surgeon who emphasized strict aseptic technique during surgical procedures, was an early champion of newly discovered anesthetics, and introduced several new operations, including the radical mastectomy for breast cancer.
• Theodor W. Hänsch (born 1941), German physicist. He received one fourth of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", sharing the prize with John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber.
• Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), Austrian economist and philosopher. Best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism. Along with Gunnar Myrdal, Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974."
• J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist.
• Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science. In physiology and psychology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and empiricism. In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics. As a philosopher, he is known for his philosophy of science, ideas on the relation between the laws of perception and the laws of nature, the science of aesthetics, and ideas on the civilizing power of science.
• Gerhard Herzberg (1904–1999), German pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971.
• David Hilbert (1862–1943), German mathematician. He is recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947), English biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929, with Christiaan Eijkman, for the discovery of vitamins. He also discovered the amino acid tryptophan, in 1901. He was appointed President of the Royal Society from 1930 to 1935.
• Gerard 't Hooft (born 1946), Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions".
• Fred Hoyle (1915–2001), English astronomer and mathematician.
• Edwin Hubble (1889–1953), American astronomer who played a crucial role in establishing the field of extragalactic astronomy and is generally regarded as the leading observational cosmologist of the 20th century. Hubble generally is known for Hubble's law. He is credited with the discovery of the existence of galaxies other than the Milky Way and his galactic red shift discovery that the loss in frequency—the redshift—observed in the spectra of light from other galaxies increased in proportion to a particular galaxy's distance from Earth. This relationship became known as Hubble's law. His findings fundamentally changed the scientific view of the universe.
• Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), German naturalist and explorer. His quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography.
• Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), English biologist and coiner of the term agnosticism.
• Robert Jastrow (1925–2008), American astronomer, physicist and cosmologist.
• Edwin Thompson Jaynes (1922–1998), American physicist and statistician. He wrote extensively on statistical mechanics and on foundations of probability and statistical inference. He also pioneered the field of Digital physics.
• Jerome Karle (1918–): American physical chemist. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques.
• August Kekulé (1829–1896), German organic chemist. He was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.
• John Kendrew (1917–1997), English biochemist and crystallographer who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz; their group in the Cavendish Laboratory investigated the structure of heme-containing proteins.
• John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), British economist. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots.
• Michio Kaku (born 1947), American theoretical physicist.
• Alfred Kastler (1902–1984), French physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1966.
• Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), Italian-French mathematician and astronomer. He made significant contributions to all fields of analysis, number theory, and classical and celestial mechanics.
• Irving Langmuir (1881–1957), American chemist and physicist. He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in surface chemistry.
• Anthony James Leggett (1938–), English-American physicist. Professor Leggett is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Joseph Leidy (1823–1891), American paleontologist.
• Mario Livio (born 1945), Israeli-American astrophysicist.
• Seth Lloyd (born 1960), American mechanical engineer. He is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• James Lovelock (born 1919), British scientist, environmentalist and futurologist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis.
• Percival Lowell (1855–1916), American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death.
• Rudolph A. Marcus (born 1923), Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of electron transfer.
• Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), American biologist. She is best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory, which is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed. She is also associated with the Gaia hypothesis, based on an idea developed by the English environmental scientist James Lovelock.
• Dan McKenzie (geophysicist) (born 1942), British geophysicist.
• Albert Abraham Michelson (1852–1931), American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Simon van der Meer (1925–2011), Dutch particle accelerator physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Carlo Rubbia for contributions to the CERN project which led to the discovery of the W and Z particles, two of the most fundamental constituents of matter.
• Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), Austrian Economist and Philosopher. He was a prominent figure in the Austrian School of economic thought.
• Ludwig Mond (1839–1909), German-born British chemist and industrialist.
• Robert S. Mulliken (1896–1986), American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Dr. Mulliken received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1966.
• Nathan Myhrvold (born 1959), American computer scientist, technologist, mathematician, physicist, entrepreneur, nature and wildlife photographer, master chef.
• David Nalin (born 1941), American physiologist. Nalin had the key insight that Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) would work if the volume of solution patients drank matched the volume of their fluid losses, and that this would drastically reduce or completely replace the only current treatment for cholera, intravenous therapy. Nalin's discoveries have been estimated to have saved over 50 million lives worldwide.
• Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the displaced victims of the First World War and related conflicts.
• Erwin Neher (1944-), German biophysicist. Along with Bert Sakmann, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1991.
• Ronald George Wreyford Norrish (1897–1978), British chemist. As a result of the development of flash photolysis, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967 along with Manfred Eigen and George Porter for their study of extremely fast chemical reactions.
• Robert Noyce (1927–1990), American physicist, businessman, and inventor. He co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip which fueled the personal computer revolution.
• Sherwin B. Nuland (born 1930), American surgeon and author of How We Die.
• Paul Nurse (born 1949), 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, called himself an atheist, but specified that "sceptical agnostic" was a more "philosophically correct" term.
• Bill Nye (born 1955), American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, mechanical engineer and scientist. Popularly known as "Bill Nye the Science Guy".
• George Olah (born 1927), 1994 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, discoverer of superacids,
• Mark Oliphant (1901–2000): Australian physicist and humanitarian. He played a fundamental role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and also the development of the atomic bomb.
• Karl Pearson (1857–1936): English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.
• Saul Perlmutter (born 1959), American astrophysicist. He shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
• Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840), French mathematician, geometer, and physicist.
• George Pólya (1888–1985), Hungarian Jewish mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education.
• Carolyn Porco (born 1953), American planetary scientist. She is best known for her work in the exploration of the outer solar system, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s.
• Vladimir Prelog (1906–1998), Croatian organic chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975.
• Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (born 1951), Indian-American neuroscientist. Best known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics.
• C. V. Raman (1888–1970), Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science in India. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for the discovery that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect.
• John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1942–1919): English physicist who, with William Ramsay, discovered the element argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. He also discovered the phenomenon now called Rayleigh scattering, explaining why the sky is blue, and predicted the existence of the surface waves now known as Rayleigh waves. Rayleigh's textbook, The Theory of Sound, is still referred to by acoustic engineers today.
• Grote Reber (1911–2002), American amateur astronomer and pioneer of radio astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering work, and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies. His 1937 radio antenna was the second ever to be used for astronomical purposes and the first parabolic reflecting antenna to be used as a "radio telescope".
• Robert Coleman Richardson (born 1937), American experimental physicist. He, along with David Lee, as senior researchers, and then graduate student Douglas Osheroff, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms in the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics.
• Charles Richet (1850–1935), French physiologist. He won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on anaphylaxis.
• Isaac Roberts (1829–1904), Welsh engineer and business man best known for his work as an amateur astronomer, pioneering the field of astrophotography of nebulae.
• Richard J. Roberts (1943–), British biochemist and molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing.
• Józef Rotblat (1908–2005), Polish-British physicist. Along with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.
• Carl Sagan (1934–1996), astronomer and skeptic.
• Frederick Sanger (1918–), English biochemist and a two-time Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.
• Peter Schuster (born 1941), Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Vienna.
• Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739), English scientist and mathematician.
• Harlow Shapley (1885–1972), American astronomer. Best known for determining the correct position of the Sun within the Milky Way galaxy.
• Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952), English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, and pathologist. He, along with Edgar Adrian, won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984), American paleontologist. He is considered to be one of the most influential paleontologist of the 20th century, and a major participant in the modern evolutionary synthesis.
• Jens C. Skou (1918–), Danish chemist. In 1997 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker) for his discovery of Na+,K+-ATPase.
• Homer Smith (1895–1962), American physiologist. His research work focused on the kidney and he discovered inulin at the same time as A.N. Richards.
• William Smith (geologist) (1769–1839), English geologist, credited with creating the first nationwide geological map. He is known as the "Father of English Geology" for collating the geological history of England and Wales into a single record, although recognition was very slow in coming.
• George Smoot (1945–), American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and $1 million TV quiz show prize winner (Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?). He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the measurement "of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation."
• Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865–1923): German-American mathematician and electrical engineer.
• Piero Sraffa (1898–1983): influential Italian economist whose book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the Neo-Ricardian school of Economics.
• Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986), Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with discovering vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle.
• Leo Szilard (1898–1964), Austro-Hungarian physicist and inventor.
• Igor Tamm (1895–1971), Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for their 1934 discovery of Cherenkov radiation.
• Edward Teller (1908–2003), Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb". Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics.
• Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), Serbian-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, and futurist. He is best known for his contributions to the modern alternating current (AC) electrical supply system. Tesla's patents and theoretical work helped form the basis of wireless communication and radio. His many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism were based on Michael Faraday's theories of electromagnetic technology.
• Thorvald N. Thiele (1838–1910), Danish astronomer, actuary and mathematician, most notable for his work in statistics, interpolation and the three-body problem. He was the first to propose a mathematical theory of Brownian motion. Thiele introduced the cumulants and (in Danish) the likelihood function; these contributions were not credited to Thiele by Ronald A. Fisher, who nevertheless named Thiele to his (short) list of the greatest statisticians of all time on the strength of Thiele's other contributions.
• E. Donnall Thomas (1920–2012), American physician, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, and director emeritus of the clinical research division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In 1990 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Joseph E. Murray for the development of cell and organ transplantation. Thomas developed bone marrow transplantation as a treatment for leukemia.
• John Tyndall (1820–1893), Prominent 19th century experimental physicist. Known for producing a number of discoveries about processes in the atmosphere.
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (born 1958), American astrophysicist, science communicator, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.
• Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984), Polish-Jewish mathematician. He participated in America's Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion.
• Martinus J. G. Veltman (born 1931), Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his former student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory.
• Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), German doctor, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician. Referred to as "the father of modern pathology," he is considered one of the founders of social medicine.
• John von Neumann (1903–1957), Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics, linear programming, game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He has been said to have been an "agnostic Catholic" due to his agreement with Pascal's Wager.
• Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He is best known for independently proposing a theory of evolution due to natural selection that prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own theory.
• André Weil (1906–1998), French mathematician. He is especially known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry.
• Walter Frank Raphael Weldon (1860–1906), English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry. He was the joint founding editor of Biometrika, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.
• Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), American mathematician and child prodigy. He is regarded as the originator of cybernetics.
• Eugene Wigner (1902–1995), Hungarian American theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles"; the other half of the award was shared between Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen. Wigner is important for having laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics as well as for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus. It was Eugene Wigner who first identified Xe-135 "poisoning" in nuclear reactors, and for this reason it is sometimes referred to as Wigner poisoning. Wigner is also important for his work in pure mathematics, having authored a number of theorems.
• Frank Wilczek (born 1951), American theoretical physicist. Along with David J. Gross and Hugh David Politzer, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004.
• Steve Wozniak (born 1950), Co-founder of Apple Computer and inventor of the Apple I and Apple II.
• Hubert Yockey (born 1916), American physicist and information theorist.
• Hans Zinsser (1878–1940), American bacteriologist and a prolific author. He is known for his work in isolating the typhus bacterium and developing a protective vaccine.