JEWISH PHYSICISTS
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SHORT LIST
  • Hans Bethe 6
  • Felix Bloch
  • Niels Bohr 7
  • Max Born
  • Albert Einstein
  • Richard Feynman
  • James Franck
  • Murray Gell-Mann
  • Heinrich Hertz 13
  • Carl G. J. Jacobi
  • Lev Landau
  • Fritz London
  • Albert A. Michelson
  • John von Neumann
  • Wolfgang Pauli 20
  • Sir Rudolf Peierls
  • Alexander Polyakov
  • I. I. Rabi
  • Julian Schwinger
  • Otto Stern
  • Steven Weinberg
  • Eugene Wigner 
  • Edward Witten
LONG LIST
  • Anatole Abragam
  • Max Abraham
  • Elihu Abrahams
  • Alexei Abrikosov 1
  • Eric Adelberger
  • Stephen Adler
  • Yakir Aharonov
  • A. Akhiezer
  • Berni Alder
  • Igor Aleiner
  • Zhores Alferov 2
  • Ralph Alpher
  • Boris Altshuler
  • Vladimir Arnold 3
  • Richard Arnowitt
  • Arthur Ashkin
  • Mark Azbel
  • John Bahcall
  • Valentine Bargmann
  • Barry Barish
  • Henry Barschall 4
  • Jeremy Baumberg
  • Gordon Baym
  • Jacob Bekenstein
  • Carl Bender
  • George Benedek
  • Vladimir Berestetsky
  • Felix Berezin 5
  • Vadim Berezinskii
  • Peter Bergmann
  • Ira Bernstein
  • Sir Michael Berry
  • Hans Bethe 6
  • John Blatt
  • Felix Bloch
  • Niels Bohr 7
  • David Bohm
  • Sir Hermann Bondi
  • Max Born
  • Herman Branover
  • Gregory Breit
  • Matvei Bronstein
  • Robert Brout
  • Solomon Buchsbaum
  • Gersh Budker
  • Herbert Callen
  • Catherine Cesarsky
  • Georges Charpak
  • E.G.D. Cohen
  • Marvin Cohen
  • Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
  • Sidney Coleman
  • Leon Cooper
  • Sidney Dancoff
  • Stanley Deser
  • David Deutsch
  • Martin Deutsch
  • Bryce DeWitt 8
  • Carlo Di Castro
  • Cyril Domb
  • Sidney Drell
  • Max Dresden
  • Mildred Dresselhaus
  • Saul Dushman
  • Igor Dzyaloshinsky 9
  • Alexander Efros
  • Paul Ehrenfest
  • Albert Einstein
  • Walter Elsasser
  • Francois Englert
  • Paul Epstein
  • Immanuel Esterman
  • Valentin Fabrikant 10
  • Ugo Fano
  • Eugene Feenberg
  • George Feher
  • Mitchell Feigenbaum
  • Gerald Feinberg
  • Herman Feshbach
  • Richard Feynman
  • David Finkelstein
  • Michael Fisher
  • Leslie Foldy
  • Efim Fradkin
  • James Franck
  • Ilya Frank 11
  • David Frank-Kamenetsky
  • Stuart Freedman
  • Yakov Frenkel
  • Herbert Friedman
  • Jerome Friedman
  • Alexander Friedmann 12
  • Sir Richard Friend 32
  • Otto Frisch
  • Herbert Fröhlich
  • Sergio Fubini
  • Dennis Gabor
  • Vsevolod Gantmakher
  • Richard Garwin
  • Theodore Geballe
  • Margaret Geller
  • Murray Gell-Mann
  • Andrea Ghez 31
  • Vitaly Ginzburg
  • Donald Glaser
  • Sheldon Glashow
  • Roy Glauber
  • Erast Gliner
  • Thomas Gold 13
  • Vitaly Goldansky
  • Marvin Goldberger
  • Gerson Goldhaber
  • Maurice Goldhaber
  • Peter Goldreich
  • Eugen Goldstein
  • Herbert Goldstein
  • Jeffrey Goldstone
  • Yuri Golfand
  • Walter Gordon
  • Kurt Gottfried
  • Samuel Goudsmit
  • Harold Grad
  • Melville Green
  • Michael Green
  • Oscar Greenberg
  • Brian Greene
  • Jesse Greenstein
  • Vladimir Gribov
  • David Gross
  • Gerald Guralnik
  • Alan Guth
  • Erwin Hahn
  • Hans von Halban
  • Bertrand Halperin
  • Morton Hamermesh
  • Haim Harari
  • John Harnad
  • Serge Haroche
  • Alan Heeger
  • Walter Heitler
  • Robert Herman
  • Heinrich Hertz 14
  • Karl Herzfeld
  • Sir Peter Hirsch
  • Robert Hofstadter
  • Theodore Holstein
  • Leopold Infeld
  • Abram Ioffe
  • Ernst Ising
  • Werner Israel
  • Claude Itzykson
  • Carl G. J. Jacobi
  • Arthur Jaffe
  • Max Jammer
  • Robert Jastrow
  • Giovanni Jona-Lasinio 15
  • Brian Josephson
  • Mark Kac
  • Leo Kadanoff
  • Arthur Kantrowitz
  • Theodore von Karman
  • Robert Karplus
  • Marc Kastner
  • Leonid Keldysh 16
  • Joseph Keller
  • Isaak Khalatnikov
  • Yuli Khariton
  • Igor Klebanov
  • Oskar Klein
  • Daniel Kleppner
  • Vadim Knizhnik
  • Walter Kohn
  • Alexander Kompaneets
  • Rudolf Kompfner
  • Michael Kosterlitz 17
  • Lew Kowarski
  • Robert Kraichnan
  • Martin Kruskal
  • Nicholas Kurti
  • Lev Landau
  • Rolf Landauer
  • Alfred Landé
  • Grigori Landsberg
  • James Langer
  • Karl Lark-Horovitz
  • Benjamin Lax
  • Melvin Lax
  • Joel Lebowitz
  • Leon Lederman
  • David Lee
  • Tullio Levi-Civita
  • Harold Levine
  • Albert Libchaber
  • Elliott Lieb
  • Robert von Lieben
  • Hans Liepmann
  • Evgeny Lifshitz
  • Ilya Lifshitz
  • E. Likhtman
  • Julius Lilienfeld
  • Harry Lipkin
  • Bernard Lippmann
  • Gabriel Lippmann
  • Abraham 'Avi' Loeb
  • Fritz London
  • Heinz London
  • Francis Low
  • Joachim Luttinger
  • Harold Lyons
  • Gustav Magnus
  • Theodore Maiman
  • Leonard Mandel
  • Benoit Mandelbrot
  • Leonid Mandelstam
  • Stanley Mandelstam
  • Geoffrey Marcy
  • Robert Marshak
  • Paul C. Martin
  • Bernd Matthias 18
  • Daniel Mattis
  • Peter Mazur
  • Lise Meitner
  • Kurt Mendelssohn
  • N. David Mermin
  • Eugen Merzbacher
  • Albert Messiah
  • Albert A. Michelson
  • Arkady Migdal
  • Mordehai Milgrom
  • Hermann Minkowski
  • Rudolph Minkowski
  • Elliot Montroll
  • Philip Morrison
  • Benjamin Mottelson
  • Hans Motz
  • Jose Moyal
  • K. Alexander Müller 19
  • Frank R. Nunes Nabarro
  • Władysław Natanson
  • Yuval Ne'eman
  • John von Neumann
  • Władysław Natanson
  • Lothar Nordheim
  • Lev Okun
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer
  • Leonard Ornstein
  • Egon Orowan
  • Douglas Osheroff 20
  • Abraham Pais
  • Wolfgang Panofsky
  • Alexander Patashinski
  • Wolfgang Pauli 21
  • Sir Rudolf Peierls
  • Solomon Pekar
  • Sir Roger Penrose 22
  • Arno Penzias
  • Sir Michael Pepper
  • Jerome Percus
  • Vladimir Perel
  • Asher Peres
  • Martin Perl
  • Saul Perlmutter
  • Gregory Pikus
  • David Pines
  • Lev Pitaevsky
  • George Placzek
  • Milton Plesset
  • Boris Podolsky
  • Valery Pokrovsky
  • H. David Politzer
  • Alexander Polyakov
  • Isaak Pomeranchuk
  • Bruno Pontecorvo
  • Ilya Prigogine
  • Henry Primakoff 23
  • Ernst Pringsheim
  • I. I. Rabi
  • Giulio Racah
  • Mark Raizen
  • Lisa Randall
  • Emmanuel Rashba
  • Frederick Reines
  • Burton Richter
  • Adam Riess
  • Wolfgang Rindler
  • Nathan Rosen
  • Marshall Rosenbluth
  • Léon Rosenfeld 24
  • Bruno Rossi
  • Norman Rostocker
  • Heinrich Rubens
  • Vera Rubin
  • Sergei Rytov
  • Robert Sachs
  • Carl Sagan
  • Edwin Salpeter
  • Myriam Sarachik
  • David Saxon
  • Arthur Schawlow 25
  • Joel Scherk
  • Leonard Schiff
  • David Schoenberg
  • David Schramm 26
  • Ivan Schuller
  • Sir Arthur Schuster
  • Melvin Schwartz
  • Albert Schwarz
  • John Schwarz
  • Karl Schwarzschild
  • Martin Schwarzschild 27
  • Julian Schwinger
  • Dennis Sciama
  • Sara Seager
  • Emilio Segrè
  • Nathan Seiberg
  • Robert Serber
  • Andrew Sessler
  • Amos de Shalit
  • Dan Shechtman
  • Stephen Shenker
  • Mikhail Shifman
  • Iosif Shklovsky
  • Arnold Siegert
  • Israel Sigal
  • Barry Simon
  • Sir Francis Simon
  • Yakov Sinai
  • Alberto Sirlin
  • Lee Smolin
  • Elias Snitzer
  • Jan Solovej
  • David Spergel
  • Alexei Starobinsky 28
  • Jack Steinberger
  • Paul Steinhardt
  • Otto Stern
  • Daniel Sternheimer
  • David Stoler
  • Raymond Stora
  • Andrew Strominger 29
  • Leonard Susskind
  • Leo Szilard
  • David Tabor
  • Igal Talmi
  • Valentine Telegdi
  • Edward Teller
  • Jerry Tersoff
  • Saul Teukolsky
  • Laszlo Tisza
  • Samuel Tolansky
  • Bruno Touschek 30
  • Sam Treiman
  • Stanislaw Ulam
  • Arkady Vainshtein
  • Vladimir Veksler
  • Gabriele Veneziano
  • Grigory Volovik
  • Emil Warburg
  • Joseph Weber
  • Alvin Weinberg
  • Steven Weinberg
  • William Weisberger
  • Rainer Weiss
  • Karl Weissenberg
  • Victor Weisskopf
  • Eugene Wigner
  • Pavel Winternitz
  • Edward Witten
  • Emil Wolf
  • Lincoln Wolfenstein
  • Siegfried Wouthuysen
  • Eli Yablonovitch
  • Amnon Yariv
  • Wolfgang Yourgrau
  • Jerrold Zacharias
  • Joshua Zak
  • Richard Zare
  • Herbert Zeiger
  • Yakov Zeldovich
  • John Ziman
  • Alex Zunger
  • George Zweig
NOTES
1. Jewish mother (née Fanya Davidovna Vulf), non-Jewish father; see The Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, Biographies A-I, edited by Herman Branover (Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998, p. 10) and Candid Science V: Conversations with Famous Scientists, by Balazs Hargittai and István Hargittai (Imperial College Press, London, 2005, p. 185).

2. See The Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, Biographies A-I, edited by Herman Branover (Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998, p. 37).  Mother's maiden name was Anna Rosenblum.  NB: This reference includes biographies of individuals who are both of  Jewish and of half-Jewish parentage, but does not generally specify which is, in fact, the case.  Alferov's father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, was most likely not Jewish.


3. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Celestial Encounters, by F. Diacu and P. Holmes (Princeton, 1996, p. 191).

4. Mixed, but mostly Jewish background.  See Biographical Memoirs, Volume 75 (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1998, p. 4).

5. See The Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, Biographies A-I, edited by Herman Branover (Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998, p. 143).  Although Berezin's father was non-Jewish, he identified as Jewish;
see Felix Berezin: The Life and Death of the Mastermind of Supermathematics, edited by Mikhail Shifman (World Scientific, Singapore, London, and Hackensack, NJ, 2007, pp. 124-125).

6. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.

7. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
8. Jewish father (Dr. Lewis Lipman Seligman), non-Jewish mother.  DeWitt was born Carl Seligman.
9. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/renormalization/Dzyaloshinskii/index.html.

10. Several visitors have confused Valentin Fabrikant with Valery Fabrikant, a Russian emigre professor convicted of multiple murders in Canada in the 1990s.  Valentin Fabrikant developed the concept of the laser in the 1930s and 1940s.  He was the first scientist to seriously analyze the process of light amplification by stimulated emission.  Working in the Soviet Union, he developed techniques for producing population inversions, including the basic collisional technique used in many gas lasers, including the HeNe laser. In a 1951 patent, he further proposed optical pumping techniques and the use of optical cavities.

11. See The Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, Biographies A-I, edited by Herman Branover (Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998, pp. 351-352).  Frank's father was Jewish and his mother non-Jewish.


12. Friedmann's paternal grandfather was a Jewish cantonist.  These were Jewish children conscripted into Russian military institutions, where they received military training and were placed under intense pressure to convert.  Upon reaching the age of eighteen, they were then forced to serve in the Czarist army for another twenty-five years.  The degree of Friedmann's Jewish ancestry is unclear, but he was probably no more than one-half Jewish.  See Alexander A. Friedmann: the Man who Made the Universe Expand, by E. A. Tropp, V. Ya. Frenkel, and A. D. Chernin (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1993, Chapter 1).  See also http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/rje_f.htm, which contains entries for both Friedmann and his father (both names spelled "Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fridman").


13. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.


14. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.  Jed Buchwald's biography of Heinrich Hertz, The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and the Discovery of Electric Waves (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p. 45), conveys the misimpression that Hertz's paternal grandmother was not of Jewish origin.  She was, in fact, born
Betty Oppenheim and was the daughter of the prominent Jewish banker Salomon Oppenheim and his wife, whose maiden name was Levy.  Hertz's father, Gustav Ferdinand Hertz (originally David Gustav Hertz), and both of Hertz's paternal grandparents, Heinrich David Hertz (originally Hertz Hertz) and Betty Oppenheim, all converted to Christianity.  (See genealogical chart on p. 46 of Buchwald's biography and http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/rz3a035/bundesstrasse1.html.)  

15. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.  See A Jew in Rome, by Richard Ellis in the April 2001 issue of Midstream.

16. See http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/rje_k.htm.  Mother, née Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh, was not Jewish; father was Benjamin Granovskii.
17. Son of the Jewish biochemist Hans Kosterlitz; see Anatomy of a Scientific Discovery, by Jeff Goldberg (Bantam, New York, 1988, pp. 11 and 111).
18. Jewish mother, father of half-Jewish descent; see http://books.nap.edu/books/0309055415/html/242.html#pagetop.
19. Jewish mother (née Feigenbaum).  Information based on statements made by Prof. Müller during a 2006 visit to Israel to receive an honorary doctorate from Bar-Ilan University.
20. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1996/osheroff-autobio.html.

21. Pauli described himself as being three-quarters Jewish in a letter to the director of the Institute for Advanced Study,
Frank Aydelotte, quoted in the April 1995 issue of Physics Today (p. 86). See also http://www.ethbib.ethz.ch/exhibit/pauli/ausreise_e.html.  According to the family-authorized biography of Pauli by Charles Enz, No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (Oxford, Oxford and New York, 2002, pp. 1-7), three of Pauli's four grandparents (all but his maternal grandmother) were Jewish.  Specifically, Pauli's father, Wolfgang Pauli, Sr. (originally Wolf Pascheles, whose parents came from the prominent Jewish Pascheles and Utitz families of Prague), converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism shortly before his marriage in 1899 to Bertha Camilla Schütz.  Bertha Schütz was raised in her mother's Roman Catholic religion, but her father was the Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz (whose biography can be found on p. 469 of Vol. 5 of S. Wininger's Grosse Jüdische National-Biographie).  Although Pauli was raised as a Roman Catholic, eventually he (and his parents) left the Church.
22. Roger Penrose's maternal grandmother, née Sonia Marie Natanson, was a Russian-Jewish pianist.  As such, Sir Roger is considered fully Jewish under Jewish Law, although he does not identify as such.
23. Jewish mother, father of half-Jewish descent; see http://books.nap.edu/books/0309052378/html/268.html#pagetop.
 
24. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see Léon Rosenfeld: Physics, Philosophy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Anja Skaar Jacobsen (World Scientific, Singapore, London, and Hackensack, NJ, 2012, p. 12).
25. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother. See section entitled "Background and Education, Toronto" in 1996 interview with Suzanne B. Riess.

26. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
27. Jewish father, Karl Schwarzschild, non-Jewish mother.

28. Jewish father, Alexander Izrailevich Starobinsky.
29. Jewish father (biochemist Jack Strominger).

30. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics, by Martinus Veltman (World Scientific, Singapore, London, and River Edge, NJ, 2003, p. 173).

31. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
32. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.



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