Physicists and astronomers

Leslie Greengard

Leslie Greengard is an applied mathematician and computer scientist, Silver Professor at NYU's Courant Institute and director at the Flatiron Institute, known for the fast multipole method.

Leslie M. Schoop

Leslie M. Schoop is a solid state chemist and Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, known for the topological semimetal ZrSiS and the square-net design principle for topological materials.

Lester Halbert Germer (1896–1971) was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, with Clinton Davisson, first demonstrated the wave properties of the electron in 1927, confirming de Broglie's hypothesis.

Leticia Cugliandolo

Leticia Cugliandolo, born 1965 in Argentina, is an Argentine statistical physicist at Sorbonne Université in Paris, known for aging and effective temperature in glassy systems.

Lev Gor'kov

Lev Petrovich Gor'kov (Лев Горьков; 1929–2016) was a Soviet-born Russian and American theoretical physicist of the Landau school, best known for the Gor'kov equations, which put superconductivity theory on a microscopic footing.

Lev Landau (Лев Давидович Ландау)

Lev Davidovich Landau was a Soviet theoretical physicist who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theories of condensed matter, especially liquid helium.

Lev Okun

Lev Borisovich Okun (Лев Борисович Окунь) was a Russian theoretical particle physicist at ITEP in Moscow who coined the term "hadron" in 1962 and campaigned against relativistic mass.

Lev P. Pitaevskii

Lev P. Pitaevskii, also known as Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii, was a Soviet and Italian theoretical physicist, co-namesake of the Gross–Pitaevskii equation governing ultracold Bose gases.

Lev Petrovich Gorkov

Lev Petrovich Gorkov (Лев Петрович Горьков; 1929–2016) was a Soviet and American theoretical physicist who in 1959 derived the Ginzburg–Landau equations of superconductivity from BCS theory, founding the GLAG framework.

Lev Shubnikov

Lev Shubnikov (Лев Шубников) was a Soviet low-temperature physicist who worked in Leiden from 1926 to 1930, founded the first Soviet cryogenic laboratory in Kharkiv, and died in the purges in 1937.

Lewis Boss

Lewis Boss (1846–1912) was an American astronomer who directed the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, from 1876, and compiled the Preliminary General Catalogue of 6188 stars in 1910.

Lewis H. Nosanow

Lewis H. Nosanow is a physicist who co-suggested in 1976 that spin-polarized hydrogen stays a gas at any temperature, launching the search for Bose–Einstein condensation.

Lewis Morris Rutherfurd

Lewis Morris Rutherfurd (1816–1892) was an American amateur astronomer who pioneered astronomical photography and stellar spectroscopy, made superior diffraction gratings, and was an original National Academy of Sciences member.

Liang Fu

Liang Fu (傅亮) is a Chinese-American condensed matter physicist and Professor of Physics at MIT, known for the theoretical prediction of topological insulators and Majorana fermion proposals.

Liang Jiang

Liang Jiang is a quantum information scientist and professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago since 2019, known for quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Libai Huang

Libai Huang is a physical chemist, Tarpo Professor at Purdue University, known for ultrafast microscopy that images exciton and hot-carrier transport in perovskites and 2D materials.

Lin Yan

Lin Yan is an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, on its professional staff since 2000, who studies infrared extragalactic astronomy and time-domain transients.

Lincoln Wolfenstein

Lincoln Wolfenstein (1923–2015) was an American particle theorist at Carnegie Mellon University known for the superweak hypothesis, the MSW effect, and the Wolfenstein parametrization of the CKM matrix.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is an American planetary scientist, principal investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to a metal asteroid, and since 2025 director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Lisa Kewley

Lisa Kewley is an Australian astronomer who studies how galaxies formed and evolved over 12 billion years, and has directed the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian since 2022.

Lisa Randall

Lisa Randall is a theoretical particle physicist and cosmologist at Harvard University, best known for the Randall–Sundrum model proposing a warped extra dimension to explain gravity's weakness.

Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner (1878–1968) was an Austrian-born physicist who gave the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission with Otto Frisch, though the 1944 Nobel Prize went to Otto Hahn alone.

Llewellyn Thomas

Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas was a British-born American theoretical physicist known for Thomas precession and the Thomas–Fermi model, and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1958.

Lloyd Hollenberg

Lloyd Hollenberg is an Australian quantum physicist at the University of Melbourne, elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2018, known for silicon quantum computing and diamond quantum sensing.

Lluís Torner

Lluís Torner (born 1961) is a Catalan physicist in optics and photonics who founded and directed the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona from 2002.

Long Ju

Long Ju is an experimental condensed-matter physicist at MIT who studies electron correlations in atomically thin materials, known for the first fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in graphene.

Loránd Eötvös

Loránd Eötvös (Eötvös Loránd, 1848–1919) was a Hungarian physicist who measured the equality of inertial and gravitational mass and invented the Eötvös torsion balance used in oil prospecting.

Lord Kelvin

Lord Kelvin, born William Thomson, was a Belfast-born physicist who founded the absolute temperature scale named the kelvin and taught at Glasgow for 53 years.

Lord Rayleigh

Lord Rayleigh, born John William Strutt, was a British physicist who worked on acoustics, optics, and gases, discovered argon, and won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics.