Physicists and astronomers

Frans Pretorius

Frans Pretorius is a computational physicist and professor of physics at Princeton University whose 2005 computer simulation of two black holes merging solved a problem long considered unsolvable.

Franz J. Gießibl

Franz J. Giessibl (born 1962) is a German physicist at the University of Regensburg known for inventing the qPlus sensor used in atomic force microscopy.

Franz M. Geiger is an American-based physical and analytical chemist, Morrison Professor at Northwestern University, who studies surfaces by nonlinear optics and co-authored the 2024 dark oxygen discovery.

Franz Pfeiffer (physicist)

Franz Pfeiffer (born 1972) is a physicist who holds the Chair of Biomedical Physics at the Technical University of Munich and works on new X-ray imaging methods.

Franz Wegner

Franz Wegner, born 1940 in Dessau, is a German theoretical physicist, professor emeritus at Heidelberg University, known for Ising lattice gauge theory, finite-size scaling, and Anderson localization.

Franz X. Kärtner

Franz X. Kärtner, also published as Franz Kärtner, is a German physicist who leads the Ultrafast Optics and X-rays group at DESY's Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg.

Fred Cummings

Frederick Williams Cummings (1931–2019) was an American theoretical physicist who co-created the Jaynes–Cummings model, a 1963 cornerstone of quantum optics, and taught at UC Riverside.

Fred Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) was a British astronomer at Cambridge who coined the term "Big Bang" while opposing it, and pioneered the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.

Fred Kavli

Fred Kavli, born Fridtjof Kavli (1927–2013), was a Norwegian-born American physicist and entrepreneur who built the Kavlico sensor company, sold it in 2000, and funded basic science through The Kavli Foundation.

Fred Lawrence Whipple

Fred Lawrence Whipple (1906–2004) was an American astronomer at Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory who proposed the "dirty snowball" model of comets and invented the Whipple spacecraft shield.

Frederic A. Rasio

Frederic A. Rasio is a Belgian-born theoretical astrophysicist and Joseph Cummings Professor at Northwestern University, a founding co-director of CIERA known for work on eccentric exoplanets and dense star clusters.

Frédéric Laquai

Frédéric Laquai is a German-born physicist who studies light-to-charge conversion in solar cell materials using ultrafast laser spectroscopy, and has been a professor at LMU Munich since 2024.

Frédéric Mila

Frédéric Mila, born 1962 in Toulouse, France, is a French and Swiss condensed matter theorist at EPFL, a leading figure in frustrated magnetism who won the 2024 Charpak-Ritz Prize.

Frederick Albert Saunders

Frederick Albert Saunders was an American physicist who taught introductory physics at Harvard from 1919 to 1941, co-developed the Russell–Saunders atomic coupling, and became a leading researcher of violin acoustics.

Frederick Charles Frank

Sir Frederick Charles Frank (1911–1998) was a British theoretical physicist at the University of Bristol known for the Frank–Read source, the spiral-growth theory of crystals, and liquid crystal theory.

Frederick Hanley Seares

Frederick Hanley Seares (1873–1964) was an American astronomer who spent 31 years at Mount Wilson Observatory, where he standardized the stellar magnitude system, extended it to very faint stars, and won the 1940 Bruce Gold Medal.

Frederick J. Leonberger

Frederick J. Leonberger is an American electrical engineer who pioneered lithium niobate integrated-optic modulators for fiber-optic networks and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2000.

Frederick Joseph Ernst

Frederick Joseph Ernst (1933–2023) was an American mathematical physicist who formulated the Ernst equation, a 1968 reduction of Einstein's equations used to derive exact black hole solutions.

Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell

Frederick Alexander Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell, known as "the Prof," was a British physicist who led Oxford's Clarendon Laboratory and advised Winston Churchill through most of World War II.

Frederick Reines

Frederick Reines was an American physicist who, with Clyde Cowan, made the first detection of the neutrino in 1956, winning a share of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Frederick Seitz

Frederick Seitz (1911–2008) was an American solid-state physicist who helped found the quantum theory of solids, led the National Academy of Sciences, and later organized the 1998 Oregon Petition against the Kyoto Protocol.

Frederick Sumner Brackett

Frederick Sumner Brackett (1896–1988) was an American physicist who discovered the infrared hydrogen lines called the Brackett series in 1922 and later developed spectroscopic methods at the National Institutes of Health.

Frederick Thomas Trouton

Frederick Thomas Trouton (1863–1922) was an Irish physicist who gave his name to Trouton's rule and designed ether-drift experiments with null results that helped prepare for special relativity.

Frederik Belinfante

Frederik Jozef Belinfante (1913–1991) was a Dutch theoretical physicist who gave one of the first general proofs of the spin-statistics theorem and co-invented the symmetrized stress-energy tensor.

Freeman Dyson

Freeman John Dyson was a British-born theoretical physicist and writer who spent his career at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and unified quantum electrodynamics in 1949.

Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels

Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels (1865–1913) was a German physicist who described the Pockels effect, the electric-field change of refractive index, in an 1893 monograph; brother of Agnes Pockels.

Friedrich Dessauer

Friedrich Dessauer (1881–1963) was a German physicist, radiologist, and Reichstag politician who pioneered radiation therapy, founded medical physics in Germany, and wrote a Catholic philosophy of technology.

Friedrich Ernst Dorn

Friedrich Ernst Dorn (1848–1916) was a German physicist who held the physics chair at the University of Halle and is credited with discovering radon in 1900.

Friedrich Hund

Friedrich Hund (1896–1997) was a German theoretical physicist who formulated Hund's rules for electron configurations, developed molecular orbital theory alongside Robert Mulliken, and discovered the quantum tunnel effect.