Physicists and astronomers

Martin Knudsen

Martin Knudsen (1871–1949) was a Danish physicist who founded the quantitative study of rarefied gas flow and set the international standards for measuring sea water salinity.

Martin L. Perl

Martin L. Perl (1927–2014) was an American particle physicist at Stanford who discovered the tau lepton and won half of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Martin Lüscher

Martin Lüscher is a theoretical physicist at CERN working on quantum chromodynamics and lattice QCD, best known for relating finite-volume two-particle energies to scattering phase shifts.

Sep 17, 2026

Martin M. Fejer is a Stanford professor of applied physics known for quasi-phase-matched nonlinear optics and microstructured ferroelectrics, and for LIGO coatings research; he joined the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Martin Rees

Martin Rees, also known as M. J. Rees, is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist who has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and studies black holes and galaxy formation.

Martin Ryle

Sir Martin Ryle was a British radio astronomer at Cambridge who invented aperture synthesis and shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first awarded for astronomical research.

Martin Schadt

Martin Schadt, born 1938 in Liestal, Switzerland, is a Swiss physicist who co-invented the twisted nematic liquid-crystal effect at Roche in 1970, the basis of LCDs.

Martin Schwarzschild

Martin Schwarzschild (1912–1997) was a German-born American astronomer, Higgins Professor at Princeton from 1950 to 1979, who made stellar evolution quantitative and pioneered balloon-borne telescopes above the atmosphere.

Martin van Hecke

Martin van Hecke, born 1967 in Amsterdam, is a Dutch physicist, professor at Leiden University and group leader at AMOLF, known for programmable, shape-shifting mechanical metamaterials.

Martin Wegener

Martin Wegener is a German physicist and professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology known for 3D laser-printed photonic and mechanical metamaterials, including invisibility cloaks working at optical wavelengths.

Martin Weitz

Martin Weitz is a German experimental physicist and professor at the University of Bonn, known for the Bose–Einstein condensate of photons reported in Nature in 2010.

Martin White (cosmologist)

Martin White is a theoretical cosmologist, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Berkeley who works on the cosmic microwave background, galaxy formation, and dark energy.

Martin Zirnbauer

Martin R. Zirnbauer, born 1958 in Moosburg, Germany, is a German theoretical physicist at the University of Cologne, known for the Altland–Zirnbauer symmetry classes and the tenfold-way classification of topological insulators and superconductors.

Martin Zwierlein

Martin Zwierlein is an experimental physicist at MIT who studies ultracold fermionic atoms and quantum gas microscopy, known for demonstrating superfluidity in a strongly interacting Fermi gas.

Martinus J.G. Veltman

Martinus J.G. Veltman (1931–2021) was a Dutch theoretical physicist who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerardus 't Hooft for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions.

Marvin Chodorow

Marvin Chodorow (1913–2005) was an American applied physicist at Stanford University whose klystron research raised microwave power from watts to megawatts, powering the SLAC accelerator.

Marvin L. Cohen

Marvin L. Cohen is an American theoretical condensed matter physicist at UC Berkeley, known for pseudopotential methods that predict materials' properties before they are made in a laboratory.

Marvin Leonard Goldberger

Marvin Leonard Goldberger, known as Murph Goldberger, was an American theoretical physicist who worked on dispersion relations and scattering theory and led Caltech from 1978 to 1987.

Sep 17, 2026

Mary Beth Wilhelm

Mary Beth Wilhelm is an American astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center who studies how biomarkers survive on Mars and received a 2025 PECASE award.

Mary K. Gaillard

Mary K. Gaillard (1939–2025) was an American theoretical particle physicist whose prediction of the charm quark's mass helped establish the Standard Model; she joined UC Berkeley's physics faculty in 1981 as its first woman.

Masaaki Tanaka

Masaaki Tanaka (田中雅明) is a Japanese physicist and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Tokyo since 2008, known for room-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductors and spin–orbit torque switching.

Masahito Ueda

Masahito Ueda (上田正仁) is a Japanese theoretical physicist at the University of Tokyo known for work on ultracold atomic gases, quantum information, and non-Hermitian topology.

Masaki Sano

Masaki Sano (佐野雅己) is a Japanese physicist known for experiments in nonequilibrium statistical physics, soft matter, and active matter, including topological defects in cell cultures.

Masami Nakagawa

Masami Nakagawa was a Japanese theoretical particle physicist of the Sakata school at Nagoya University, co-author of the 1962 MNS paper that proposed neutrino flavor mixing and oscillation.

Masataka Nakazawa

Masataka Nakazawa (中沢正隆), born in 1952, is a Japanese optical communications researcher at Tohoku University whose erbium-doped fiber amplifier and soliton transmission work underpin global submarine cables, earning the 2023 Japan Prize.

Masato Sagawa

Masato Sagawa (佐川眞人), born 1943 in Tokushima, Japan, is a Japanese materials scientist who invented the sintered Nd-Fe-B permanent magnet in 1982, now used in electric-vehicle motors and wind turbines.

Masatoshi Koshiba

Masatoshi Koshiba (小柴昌俊) was a Japanese experimental particle physicist at the University of Tokyo who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting cosmic neutrinos.

Masaya Notomi

Masaya Notomi is a Japanese nanophotonics researcher at NTT Basic Research Laboratories, known for light propagation in strongly modulated photonic crystals and attojoule all-optical switching.

Massimiliano Di Ventra

Massimiliano Di Ventra is a theoretical physicist, professor at UC San Diego since 2004, known for MemComputing, the ionic Coulomb blockade, and DNA sequencing by tunneling.