The following is a partial list of notable theoretical physicists. Arranged by century of birth, then century of death, then year of birth, then year of death, then alphabetically by surname. For explanation of symbols, see Notes at end of this article.
Ancient times Kaṇāda (6th century BCE or 2nd century BCE) Thales (c. 624 – c. 546 BCE) Pythagoras^* (c. 570 – c. 495 BCE) Democritus° (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE) Aristotle‡ (384–322 BCE) Archimedesº* (c. 287 – c. 212 BCE) Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 170 AD) Hypatia^ªº (c. 350–370; died 415 AD)
Middle Ages Al Farabi (c.872–c.950) Ibn al-Haytham (c.965–c.1040) Al Beruni (c.973–c.1048) Omar Khayyám (c.1048–c.1131) Bhaskara II (c.1114–c.1185) Mu'ayyad al-Din al-Urdi (c.1200–c.1266) Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201–1274) Jean Buridan (1301–c.1359/62) Nicole Oresme (c.1320/1325–1382) Jamshid al-Kashi (1380–1429) Sigismondo Polcastro (1384–1473) Ulugh Beg (1394–1449)
15th–16th century Giovanni Bianchini (1410–1469) Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Nicolaus Copernicusº (1473–1543)
16th century and 16th–17th centuries Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Galileo Galileiº* (1564–1642) Johannes Keplerº (1571–1630) Benedetto Castelli (1578–1643) René Descartes‡^ (1596–1650) Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647)
17th century Pierre de Fermat (1607–1665) Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) Jeremiah Horrocks (1618–1641) Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618–1663) Jacques Rohault (1618–1672) Blaise Pascal^ (1623–1662) Erhard Weigel (1625–1699) Christiaan Huygens^ (1629–1695) Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636–1673)
17th–18th centuries Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703) Christopher Wren (1632–1723) Robert Hooke (1635–1703) Isaac Newton^*º (1642–1727) Gottfried Leibniz^ (1646–1716) John Flamsteed (1646–1719) Edmond Pourchot (1651–1734) Jacob Bernoulli (1655–1705) Edmond Halley (1656–1742) Luigi Guido Grandi (1671–1742) Jakob Hermann (1678–1733) Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan (1678–1771) Nicolaus II Bernoulli (1695–1726) Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782)
18th century Leonhard Euler^ (1707–1783) Vincenzo Riccati (1707–1785) Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765) Laura Bassiª* (1711–1778) Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Johann Samuel König (1712–1757) Alexis Clairaut (1713–1765) Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783)
18th–19th centuries Franz Aepinus (1724–1802) Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) Charles Coulomb (1736–1806) Joseph Lagrange^º (1736–1813) Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) Jurij Vega (1754–1802) John Dalton^ (1766–1844) Joseph Fourier^ (1768–1830) Thomas Young‡* (1773–1829) Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) Étienne-Louis Malus (1775–1812) André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) Sophie Germain (1776–1831) Carl Friedrich Gauss^ (1777–1855) Louis Poinsot (1777–1859) Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana (1781–1864) Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846) Claude-Louis Navier (1785–1836) François Arago (1786–1853) Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827) Georg Ohm (1789–1854) Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857) Félix Savart (1791–1841) Ottaviano-Fabrizio Mossotti (1791–1863) Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis (1792–1843) George Green^ (1793–1841) Michel Chasles (1793–1880) Gabrio Piola (1794–1850) Gabriel Lamé (1795–1870) Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) Nikolai Brashman (1796–1866) Andreas von Ettingshausen (1796–1878) Jean Léonard Marie Poiseuille (1797–1869) Jean-Marie Duhamel (1797–1872) Franz Ernst Neumann (1798–1895) Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron (1799–1864)
19th century Mikhail Ostrogradsky (1801–1862) Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) Viktor Bunyakovsky (1804–1889) William Hamilton^º (1805–1865) Samuel Earnshaw (1805–1888) Julius Weisbach (1806–1871) Athanase Dupré (1808–1869) Joseph Liouville (1809–1882) Auguste Bravais (1811–1863) Osip Ivanovich Somov (1815–1876) Charles-Eugène Delaunay (1816–1872) Jonathan Homer Lane (1819–1880) William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) Pafnuty Chebyshev (1821–1894) Hermann von Helmholtz‡† (1821–1894) Johann Josef Loschmidt (1821–1895) August Krönig (1822–1879) Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) August Davidov (1823–1885) Gustav Kirchhoff (1824–1887) Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) Ludvig Lorenz (1829–1891) James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Johann Bauschinger (1834–1893) Josef Stefan (1835–1893) Eugen von Lommel (1837–1899) Carlo Alberto Castigliano (1847–1884) Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850–1891) Pierre Henri Hugoniot (1851–1887) Heinrich Hertz* (1857–1894)
19th–20th centuries
Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet (1819–1903) William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin* (1824–1907) Rodolphe Radau (1835–1911) Christian Otto Mohr (1835–1918) Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837–1923) Thorvald N. Thiele (1838–1910) George William Hill (1838–1914) Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Viktor von Lang (1838–1921) J. Willard Gibbs†^ (1839–1903) Ernst Abbe (1840–1905) Osborne Reynolds (1842–1912) (1842–1914) John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919) Joseph Valentin Boussinesq (1842–1929) Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) Nikolay Umov (1846–1915) Mór Réthy (1846–1925) Nikolay Zhukovsky (1847–1921) Diederik Korteweg (1848–1941) Horace Lamb (1849–1934) Woldemar Voigt (1850–1919) Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925) Jacobus Kapteyn (1851–1922) Arthur Schuster (1851–1934) Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (1852–1911) John Henry Poynting (1852–1914) Orest Khvolson (1852–1934) Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) Alfred Barnard Basset (1854–1930) Emil Cohn (1854–1944) Marcel Brillouin (1854–1948) Max Margules (1856–1920) Carl Runge (1856–1927) Anatole Leduc (1856–1937) Aleksandr Lyapunov (1857–1918) Samuel Oppenheim (1857–1928) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) Joseph Larmor (1857–1942) Maurice Couette (1858–1943) Max Planck (1858–1947) Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927) Karl Heun (1859–1929) Vito Volterra (1860–1940) Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) Emil Wiechert (1861–1928) Robert Emden (1862–1940) Paul Drude (1863–1906) Arthur Gordon Webster (1863–1923) Augustus Edward Hough Love (1863–1940) Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) Vladimir Steklov (1864–1926) Wilhelm Wien (1864–1928) Władysław Natanson (1864–1937) Walther Nernst (1864–1941) Pierre Weiss (1865–1940) Pieter Zeeman (1865–1943) Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963) Gustav de Vries (1866–1934) Martin Kutta (1867–1944) Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1951) Gustav Mie (1868–1957) Sergey Chaplygin (1869–1942) Nikolai Kasterin (1869–1947) Élie Cartan (1869–1951) Alfred-Marie Liénard (1869–1958) Louis Bachelier (1870–1946) Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) Émile Jouguet (1871–1943) Boris Galerkin (1871–1945) Martin Knudsen (1871–1949) Émile Borel (1871–1956) Marian Smoluchowski (1872–1917) Paul Langevin (1872–1946) Ludwik Silberstein (1872–1948) Théophile de Donder (1872–1957) Karl Schwarzschild (1873–1916) Alfred Robb (1873–1936) Tullio Levi-Civita (1873–1941) Constantin Carathéodory (1873–1950) H. Stanley Allen (1873–1954) E. T. Whittaker (1873–1956) Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874–1915) Vagn Walfrid Ekman (1874–1954) Hans Reissner (1874–1967) Max Abraham (1875–1922) Louis Napoleon George Filon (1875–1937) Vladimir Ignatowski (1875–1942) Gilbert N. Lewis (1875–1946) Ludwig Prandtl (1875–1953) Tatyana Ehrenfest-Afanasevaª (1876–1964) James Jeans° (1877–1946) Eduard Grüneisen (1877–1949) Georg Hamel (1877–1954) Walther Ritz (1878–1909) Marcel Grossmann (1878–1936) Czesław Białobrzeski (1878–1953) Lise Meitner (1878–1968) Stephen Timoshenko (1878–1972) Leonid Mandelstam (1879–1944) Carl Wilhelm Oseen (1879–1944) Albert Einsteinº (1879–1955) Nikolay Krylov (1879–1955) Max von Laue (1879–1960) Otto Sackur (1880–1914) Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) Leonard Ornstein (1880–1941) Nikolai Papaleksi (1880–1947) Alfred J. Lotka (1880–1949) Abram Ioffe (1880–1960) Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) Gunnar Nordström (1881–1923) Jun Ishiwara (1881–1947) Walter Rogowski (1881–1947) Richard Tolman° (1881–1948) Gustav Herglotz (1881–1953) Irving Langmuir (1881–1957) Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963) Erwin Madelung (1881–1972) Ebenezer Cunningham (1881–1977) Emmy Noether^ª (1882–1935) Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) Harry Bateman (1882–1946) Max Born (1882–1970) Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Paul Sophus Epstein (1883–1966) Ludwig Hopf (1884–1939) Arthur Erich Haas (1884–1941) George David Birkhoff (1884–1944) David Enskog (1884–1947) Peter Debye (1884–1966) Philipp Frank (1884–1966) Vsevolod Frederiks (1885–1944) Naum Idelson (1885–1951) Theodor Kaluza (1885–1954) Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Victor Robertovich Bursian (1886–1945) Rudolf Seeliger (1886–1965) Friedrich Kottler (1886–1965) Paul Lévy (1886–1971) Geoffrey Taylor (1886–1975) Walter H. Schottky (1886–1976) Richard Becker (1887–1955) Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Charles Galton Darwin (1887–1962) Adriaan Fokker (1887–1972) Erich Kretschmann (1887–1973) Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen (1887–1974) Waloddi Weibull (1887–1979) Alexander Weinstein (1887–1979) Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff (1897–1994) Alexander Friedmann (1888–1925) Walther Kossel (1888–1956) Viktor Trkal (1888–1956) Wilhelm Lenz (1888–1957) Georges Darmois (1888–1960) Antonio Signorini (1888–1963) Frits Zernike (1888–1966) Sydney Chapman (1888–1970) Joseph Proudman (1888–1975) Alfred Landé (1888–1976) Hans Thirring (1888–1976) Paul Peter Ewald (1888–1985) Ralph H. Fowler (1889–1944) Léon Brillouin (1889–1969) Wojciech Rubinowicz (1889–1974) Harry Nyquist (1889–1976) Edwin C. Kemble (1889–1984) Yoshio Nishina (1890–1951) Yurii Aleksandrovich Krutkov (1890–1952) Josef Lense (1890–1985) Arthur March (1891–1957) George Barker Jeffery (1891–1957) Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Nikoloz Muskhelishvili (1891–1976) Philippe Le Corbeiller (1891–1980) Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989) Arthur Holly Compton (1892–1962) Karl Herzfeld (1892–1978) Louis de Broglie (1892–1987) Walter Gordon (1893–1939) Meghnad Saha (1893–1956) Erwin Fues (1893–1970) Cornelius Lanczos (1893–1974) Francis Murnaghan (1893–1976) Adolf Kratzer (1893–1983) Yakov Frenkel (1894–1952) Hans Kramers (1894–1952) Pyotr Lukirsky (1894–1954) John Lennard-Jones (1894–1954) Aleksandr Khinchin (1894–1959) Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974) Oskar Klein (1894–1977) Étienne Biéler (1895–1929) Hugo Tetrode (1895–1931) Pyotr Savvich Tartakovsky (1895–1940) (1895–1951) Karel Niessen (1895–1967) Igor Tamm (1895–1971) Hans Falkenhagen (1895–1971) Vasily Vladimirovich Shuleikin (1895–1979) Jan Burgers (1895–1981) Aldo Pontremoli (1896–1928) William Reginald Dean (1896–1973) Boris Podolsky (1896–1966) Erich Hückel (1896–1980) Robert S. Mulliken (1896–1986) Nikolay Semyonov (1896–1986) Friedrich Hund (1896–1997) Myron Mathisson (1897–1940) Douglas Hartree (1897–1958) Lewi Tonks (1897–1971) Ivan Stranski (1897–1979) John Lighton Synge (1897–1995) Ali Moustafa Mosharafa (1898–1950) Ronald Wilfred Gurney (1898–1953) Leó Szilárd (1898–1964) Egil Hylleraas (1898–1965) Leopold Infeld (1898–1968) (1898–1974) Vladimir Fock (1898–1974) Gregor Wentzel (1898–1978) Frank C. Hoyt (1898–1980) Robert d'Escourt Atkinson (1898–1982) Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898–1988) Ivar Waller (1898–1991) (1899–1967) Edmund Clifton Stoner (1899–1968) John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (1899–1980) Gregory Breit (1899–1981) (1899–1982) Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim (1899–1985) Gleb Wataghin (1899–1986) Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina (1899–1999) Wilhelm Cauer (1900–1945) Fritz London (1900–1954) Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Walter Tollmien (1900–1968) William V. Houston (1900–1968) John C. Slater (1900–1976) Beryl May Dent (1900–1977) Mikhail Lavrentyev (1900–1980) Vladimir Rojansky (1900–1981) Robert Bruce Lindsay (1900–1985) George Eugene Uhlenbeck (1900–1988)