Physicists and astronomers

Norman Horowitz

Norman Horowitz (1915–2005) was an American geneticist, professor of biology at Caltech, who worked on the one-gene, one-enzyme experiments in Neurospora and designed the Viking lander's life-detection experiment for Mars.

Norman James Petch

Norman James Petch (1917–1992) was a British metallurgist whose 1953 paper on the cleavage strength of polycrystals gave the grain-size term of the Hall–Petch relation; he held metallurgy chairs at Leeds, Newcastle, and Strathclyde.

Norman Jarosik

Norman Jarosik is an American experimental cosmologist, a Senior Research Physicist at Princeton University who led the WMAP radiometer systems and shared the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Norman Kroll

Norman Kroll (1922–2004) was an American theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum electrodynamics who made the first correct calculation of the Lamb shift and taught at UC San Diego.

Norman Lockyer

Norman Lockyer, full name Joseph Norman Lockyer, was an English astronomer who proposed helium from the solar spectrum and founded the journal Nature in 1869.

Norman Margolus

Norman Margolus is a physicist and computer scientist at MIT, best known for the Margolus–Levitin theorem bounding computation speed and for building cellular automata machines.

Norman Murray

Norman Murray is a Canadian-based theoretical astrophysicist at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, known for work on disk winds, planetary migration, and star formation.

Norris Bradbury

Norris Bradbury (Norris Edwin Bradbury, 1909–1997) was an American physicist who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory from 1945 to 1970, succeeding J. Robert Oppenheimer and leading its postwar transformation.

Nuh Gedik

Nuh Gedik is an experimental condensed matter physicist who is the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT, known for creating time-resolved techniques that probe charge, spin, and lattice dynamics in quantum materials.

Nuno Santos (Portuguese astrophysicist)

Nuno Santos is a Portuguese astrophysicist and full professor at the University of Porto who studies exoplanets, co-leads the ESPRESSO spectrograph, and won the 2010 Ambartsumian prize.

Ofer Biham

Ofer Biham is an Israeli physicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem known for the Biham-Middleton-Levine traffic model and stochastic methods for chemistry on interstellar dust grains.

Ogden Rood

Ogden Rood was an American physicist and professor of physics at Columbia College in New York, best known for his 1879 book Modern Chromatics on color.

Ole Rømer

Ole Rømer, also known as Ole Christensen Rømer or Olaus Roemer, was a Danish astronomer who in 1676 first demonstrated observationally that light travels at a finite speed.

Oleg D. Jefimenko

Oleg D. Jefimenko (1922–2009) was an American physicist at West Virginia University known for Jefimenko's equations and for electrostatic motors powered by the earth's atmospheric electric field.

Oleg Lavrentiev

Oleg Lavrentiev (Олег Лаврентьєв) was a Soviet and Ukrainian physicist whose 1950 letter from Sakhalin proposed a hydrogen bomb design and inspired Sakharov's fusion work, leading to the tokamak.

Oleg Lavrentovich

Oleg D. Lavrentovich, born 1958, is a Ukrainian-born soft-matter physicist at Kent State University known for work on topological defects, nonlinear electrophoresis, and ferroelectric nematics.

Olester Benson Jr.

Olester Benson Jr. is a retired American chemist and Corporate Scientist at 3M who holds 89 United States patents and is elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Olin Chaddock Wilson

Olin Chaddock Wilson (1909–1994) was an American stellar spectroscopist at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, known for the Wilson–Bappu effect and stellar activity cycles.

Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925) was a self-educated English mathematical physicist who reduced Maxwell's theory to four vector equations and developed transmission line theory and operational calculus.

Oliver Lodge

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge (1851–1940) was a British physicist who pioneered radio tuning and wireless telegraphy, then became the first Principal of the University of Birmingham.

Oliver Penrose

Oliver Penrose is a British mathematical physicist known for the Penrose–Onsager criterion for Bose–Einstein condensation, brother of Roger Penrose, and a Royal Society Fellow elected in 1987.

Olle Eriksson

Olle Eriksson is a Swedish condensed-matter physicist, professor of materials theory at Uppsala University since 2002, known for first-principles calculations of magnetism and atomistic spin dynamics, including the UppASD code.

Sep 20, 2026

Olli Ikkala

Olli Ikkala, born 1953, is a Finnish physicist known for work on self-assembling functional materials, who was Professor of Polymer Physics at Aalto University from 1999 to 2018 and received the Finnish Science Award in 2023.

Olli Lounasmaa

Olli Lounasmaa (1930–2002) was a Finnish physicist in low-temperature physics and biomagnetism who founded Helsinki University of Technology's Low Temperature Laboratory in 1965 and developed magnetoencephalography for brain research.

Ondrej Krivanek

Ondrej Krivanek (Ondřej Křivánek) is a Czech-British physicist who designed the first practical aberration corrector for electron microscopes, co-founded Nion, and won the 2020 Kavli Prize.

Oreste Piccioni

Oreste Piccioni (1915–2002) was an Italian experimental particle physicist, the last of Enrico Fermi's students, who co-discovered the antineutron in 1956 and long disputed his exclusion from the 1955 antiproton discovery.

Ortwin Hess

Ortwin Hess is a theoretical physicist working in quantum nanophotonics and metamaterials at Trinity College Dublin, known for the 2007 trapped rainbow principle and the Royal Society's Rumford Medal.

Oscar W. Greenberg

Oscar W. Greenberg is an American physicist who in 1964 introduced the three-valued quark charge now called color, resolving the spin-statistics paradox and providing an ingredient of quantum chromodynamics.

Oskar Backlund

Oskar Backlund, known in Russia as Oskar Andreevich Baklund, was a Swedish-born astronomer who directed the Pulkovo Observatory from 1895 to 1916 and studied Encke's comet.