Physicists and astronomers

Leo Goldberg

Leo Goldberg (1913–1987) was an American astronomer known for pioneering studies of the sun from space, including the first recognition of coronal holes in solar wind data.

Leo Graetz

Leo Graetz (1856–1941) was a German physicist at the University of Munich known for the Graetz number, the Graetz problem, and the Graetz bridge rectifier.

Leo Groß

Leo Gross is a German physicist at IBM Research Zurich who leads its atom and molecule manipulation group and pioneered bond-resolving AFM with CO-functionalized tips in 2009.

Leo Hollberg

Leo W. Hollberg is an American physicist known for precision laser spectroscopy and the chip-scale atomic clock, developed at NIST in Boulder before he joined Stanford in 2011.

Leo Kadanoff

Leo Kadanoff (1937–2015) was an American theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago whose 1966 block-spin work explained universality and laid the basis for the renormalization group.

Sep 20, 2026

Leo P. Kouwenhoven

Leo P. Kouwenhoven (born 1963) is a Dutch experimental physicist and professor at TU Delft and QuTech, known for spin qubits and Majorana bound states.

Leo Szilard (Leó Szilárd, born Leó Spitz) was a Hungarian-American physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction, co-patented the first nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, and drafted the Einstein letter that launched the Manhattan Project.

Leó Szilárd

Leó Szilárd, born Leo Spitz, was a Hungarian-American physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and helped demonstrate the first self-sustaining one in 1942.

Leon Balents

Leon Balents, born 1967, is an American theoretical physicist at UC Santa Barbara known for spin liquids, topological insulators, and his 2010 Nature review of frustrated magnets.

Léon Brillouin

Léon Brillouin (1889–1969) was a French-born physicist who helped found solid-state theory, contributed to quantum mechanics and information theory, and named Brillouin zones and Brillouin scattering.

Leon Lucy

Leon B. Lucy (1938–2018) was an astrophysicist who founded the modern theory of radiation-driven stellar winds, co-invented smoothed-particle hydrodynamics, and won the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 2000.

Leon M. Lederman

Leon M. Lederman (Leon Max Lederman) was an American experimental particle physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the muon neutrino.

Leon Mestel

Leon Mestel (1927–2017) was a British astronomer and authority on cosmic magnetism whose 1952 white dwarf cooling theory lets white dwarfs serve as cosmic clocks.

Leon N. Cooper

Leon N. Cooper, also known as Leon Cooper, was an American physicist at Brown University who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for the BCS theory of superconductivity.

Léon Rosenfeld

Léon Rosenfeld (1904–1974) was a Belgian theoretical physicist, a pioneer of quantum field theory, Niels Bohr's assistant and collaborator from 1930 to 1962, and founding editor of the journal Nuclear Physics.

Léon Sanche

Léon Sanche is a Canadian physicist at the Université de Sherbrooke, a professor there since 1972, known for his 2000 Science paper showing that low-energy secondary electrons break DNA strands.

Léon van Hove

Léon van Hove (1924–1990) was a Belgian theoretical physicist who named the van Hove singularities and correlation function, led CERN's Theory Division, and was research director general 1976–1980.

Leonard Culhane

Leonard Culhane, known as Len Culhane, is a solar and X-ray astronomer who led UK spectrometers from the Ariel satellites to Hinode, winning the 2006 RAS Gold Medal.

Leonard I. Schiff

Leonard I. Schiff (1915–1971) was an American theoretical physicist at Stanford University, author of the graduate textbook Quantum Mechanics and proposer of the gyroscope experiment Gravity Probe B.

Leonard Mandel

Leonard Mandel (1927–2001) was a German-born physicist at the University of Rochester, a founding figure of quantum optics whose laboratory made the first observation of photon antibunching in 1977.

Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow (born 1954) is an American theoretical physicist and best-selling author who co-wrote two books with Stephen Hawking and wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Leonard Ornstein

Leonard Ornstein, also known as Leonard Salomon Ornstein, was a Dutch theoretical physicist who held the Utrecht chair of mathematical physics from 1915 and gave his name to the Ornstein–Zernike equation and the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process.

Leonard Susskind

Leonard Susskind, also known as Lenny Susskind, is an American theoretical physicist and Felix Bloch professor at Stanford, known for string theory, black hole complementarity, and the holographic principle.

Leonard T. Troland

Leonard T. Troland, also known as Leonard Thompson Troland, was an American physicist who coined "photon" as a unit of retinal illumination and led the Optical Society of America.

Leonid Keldysh

Leonid Keldysh (Леонид Келдыш) was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, known for the Keldysh diagram technique, the Keldysh parameter, and the Franz–Keldysh effect.

Leonid Levitov

Leonid S. Levitov is a Russian-born theoretical condensed matter physicist and professor of physics at MIT, known for leviton current pulses, graphene valley currents, and electron hydrodynamics.

Leonid Mandelstam

Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (Леонид Исаакович Мандельштам, 1879–1944) was a Soviet physicist who co-discovered the Raman effect in 1928 and founded the Moscow school of radiophysics and oscillation theory.

Leopold Infeld

Leopold Infeld (1898–1968) was a Polish theoretical physicist who co-authored the Born–Infeld theory, the Einstein–Infeld–Hoffmann equations, and the popular book The Evolution of Physics with Einstein.

Leopoldo Máximo Falicov

Leopoldo Máximo Falicov (1933–1995) was an Argentine-born theoretical physicist who led the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley and introduced the Falicov–Kimball model of metal–insulator transitions in 1969.