General articles: Physical world and mathematics

David Tabor (physicist)

David Tabor (1913–2005) was a British physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, who showed that adhesion at tiny contact areas is a major source of friction between metals.

David Thornalley is a British paleoceanographer and Professor of Ocean and Climate Science at University College London who studies Atlantic Ocean circulation, reconstructing its history from sediment cores.

David Titley

David W. Titley is a retired US Navy rear admiral and meteorologist who, as the Navy's Oceanographer and Navigator, led Task Force Climate Change and later became chief operating officer of NOAA.

David Todd Wilkinson

David Todd Wilkinson (1935–2002) was an American experimental cosmologist at Princeton who spent his career measuring the cosmic microwave background and was the driving force behind the WMAP satellite.

David Tománek

David Tománek, born 1954 in Prague, is a Czech-born theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at Michigan State University known for predicting high thermal conductivity in carbon nanotubes.

Sep 20, 2026

David Vanderbilt

David Vanderbilt, born in 1954, is an American condensed matter physicist at Rutgers University known for first-principles electronic-structure theory, the ultrasoft pseudopotential, and his 2009 axion electrodynamics paper.

David Vogan

David Vogan, born 1954, is an American mathematician at MIT who proved the Kazhdan–Lusztig conjectures and helped compute the character table of the Lie group E8.

Oct 15, 2026

David W. Allan

David W. Allan, born in 1936, is an American atomic clock physicist who spent 32 years at NBS/NIST in Boulder, where the Allan variance is named for him.

David W. Barnette

David W. Barnette is a mathematician and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, known for the Lower Bound Theorem and his 1969 Hamiltonian cycles conjecture.

David W. Flaherty

David W. Flaherty is an American chemical engineer in heterogeneous catalysis and a professor at Georgia Tech since 2023, known for direct hydrogen peroxide synthesis research.

David W. Lea

David W. Lea is an American paleoceanographer and marine geochemist, a professor at UC Santa Barbara since 1989 known for developing chemical proxies that reconstruct past ocean temperature and chemistry.

David W. McCall

David W. McCall, born 1928 in Omaha, Nebraska, is an American physical chemist who led chemical research at Bell Labs and studied molecular motion in polymers.

David W. McLaughlin

David W. McLaughlin is an American applied mathematician, Silver Professor of Mathematics and Neural Science at NYU's Courant Institute, known for soliton research and models of the visual cortex.

David W. Oxtoby

David W. Oxtoby is an American theoretical physical chemist known for work on nucleation, who served as president of Pomona College and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

David Walker (geologist)

David Walker is an American experimental petrologist, Higgins Professor Emeritus at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, known for experiments on lunar samples, planetary interiors, and the Walker-type multi-anvil apparatus.

David Weld

David Weld is an American experimental AMO physicist and professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies quantum simulation with ultracold atoms in driven optical lattices and won a PECASE award.

David White (paleobotanist)

David White, full name Charles David White (1862–1935), was an American paleobotanist and geologist who spent his forty-nine-year career with the United States Geological Survey.

David Williams (astronomer)

David Arnold Williams, born 1937, is a British astrochemist and Emeritus Perren Professor of Astronomy at University College London who won the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 2009.

David Y. Curtin

David Yarrow Curtin (1920–2011) was an American physical organic chemist and University of Illinois professor, namesake of the Curtin–Hammett principle of product selectivity in organic reactions.

Davide Bonifazi

Davide Bonifazi (born 1975) is an Italian organic and supramolecular chemist, Chair Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Vienna since 2020, known for heteroatom-doped nanographenes.

Davide Gaiotto

Davide Gaiotto is a theoretical and mathematical physicist holding the Krembil Galileo Galilei Chair at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, known for the AGT correspondence and generalized global symmetries.

Davide Marenduzzo

Davide Marenduzzo is a theoretical biophysicist and Professor of Computational Biophysics at the University of Edinburgh, known for polymer-physics models of chromosome organization and transcription.

Davis–Putnam algorithm

The Davis–Putnam algorithm, introduced by Martin Davis and Hilary Putnam in 1960, is a complete decision procedure for propositional satisfiability that eliminates one variable at a time by resolution.

Davisson–Germer experiment

The Davisson–Germer experiment was a 1927 electron-scattering study at Bell Telephone Laboratories in which electrons diffracted from a single nickel crystal, confirming Louis de Broglie's hypothesis of matter waves.

Dawei Feng

Dawei Feng is an American-based materials chemist and Y. Austin Chang Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working on metal-organic frameworks for energy storage.

Dawn

Dawn is the first appearance of light in the eastern sky before sunrise, occurring in three stages, astronomical, nautical, and civil, as the Sun climbs toward the horizon.

Dawn J. Wright

Dawn J. Wright is an American geographer and marine geologist who has served as Chief Scientist of the mapping company Esri since 2011, applying GIS to the ocean and seafloor.

Dawn M. Meekhof

Dawn M. Meekhof is a physicist who, as a NIST Boulder postdoctoral fellow, first-authored the 1996 paper creating Fock and squeezed states of a trapped ion's motion, cited in the 2012 Nobel Prize background.