Physical and mathematical scientists

Joseph Sweetman Ames

Joseph Sweetman Ames (1864–1943) was an American physicist and Johns Hopkins University president known for spectroscopy research and chairing the NACA, forerunner of NASA's Ames Research Center.

Joseph T. Kummer (1919–1997) was an American chemical engineer and electrochemist at Ford Motor Company's research laboratories, known for inventing the sodium-sulfur battery and pioneering beta-alumina ionic conductors.

Joseph Tyrrell

Joseph Burr Tyrrell was a Canadian geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada who in 1884 found the Albertosaurus skull in the Alberta badlands and later explored the Barren Lands.

Joseph Valentin Boussinesq

Joseph Valentin Boussinesq (1842–1929) was a French mathematician and physicist known for the Boussinesq approximation, the Boussinesq equation for water waves, and the eddy-viscosity hypothesis in turbulence.

Joseph Veverka

Joseph Frank Veverka, born 1941, is an American planetary astronomer and Cornell professor emeritus who led imaging teams on Voyager, Galileo, NEAR, and Deep Impact, and won the 2013 Kuiper Prize.

Joseph Victor Smith

Joseph Victor Smith (1928–2007) was an English mineralogist and crystallographer who spent 45 years as a University of Chicago professor, known for feldspar crystal structures, zeolite frameworks, and Apollo lunar sample analysis.

Joseph W. Kennedy

Joseph W. Kennedy (1916–1957) was an American chemist who co-discovered plutonium at Berkeley in 1941, led Los Alamos' Chemistry and Metallurgy Division, and chaired chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis.

Joseph W. Orenstein

Joseph W. Orenstein is an experimental condensed matter physicist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, known for ultrafast optical studies of quantum materials.

Joseph W. Perry

Joseph W. Perry (1955–2022) was an American physical chemist and Georgia Tech professor known for two-photon absorption, optical limiting, and 3D microfabrication, and a 1999 Nature paper.

Joseph W. Ziller

Joseph W. Ziller is an American X-ray crystallographer and staff scientist who has directed UC Irvine's X-ray Crystallography Facility since 1986, co-authoring actinide and lanthanide structures.

Sep 20, 2026

Joseph Wang

Joseph Wang, born 1948, is an electrochemist and nanoengineer who holds the SAIC Endowed Chair at UC San Diego, known for wearable chemical sensors, synthetic nanomotors, and on-body energy systems.

Joseph Weber

Joseph Weber (1919–2000) was an American physicist at the University of Maryland who founded the experimental search for gravitational waves and pioneered the resonant bar detector.

Joseph Wedderburn

Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn was a Scottish mathematician who proved in 1905 that every finite division algebra is commutative, and gave the structure theory of semisimple algebras.

Joseph Winlock

Joseph Winlock (1826–1875) was an American astronomer, third director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1866, and a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Joseph Wyan Chamberlain

Joseph Wyan Chamberlain (1928–2004) was an American astronomer and geophysicist specializing in the aurora, airglow, and planetary atmospheres; an airglow band system bears his name.

Joshua A. Breslau

Joshua A. Breslau, also known as Joshua Adam Breslau, is an American computational plasma physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory known for the M3D simulation codes.

Joshua C. Bienfang

Joshua C. Bienfang is an American physicist at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, working on quantum communications and single-photon detection, who received a Presidential Early Career Award in 2006.

Joshua D. Caldwell

Joshua D. Caldwell, also known as Joshua Caldwell, is an American materials scientist and professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University known for phonon polariton research.

Joshua E. Goldberger

Joshua E. Goldberger is the Charles H. Kimberly Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Ohio State, a leader in two-dimensional materials known for germanane and goniopolar materials.

Joshua Edel

Joshua B. Edel is a professor of biosensing and analytical sciences at Imperial College London, where since 2006 he has developed single-molecule sensors, including nanopores and nanoscale tweezers.

Sep 20, 2026

Joshua Jortner

Joshua Jortner (Hebrew: יהושע יורטנר), born in Poland in 1933, is an Israeli physical chemist at Tel Aviv University known for radiationless transitions and electron transfer theory.

Joshua N. Goldberg

Joshua N. Goldberg, also known as Joshua Norman Goldberg, was an American mathematical physicist at Syracuse University known for the 1962 Goldberg–Sachs theorem on Einstein's equations.

Joshua S. Figueroa

Joshua S. Figueroa is an American inorganic and organometallic chemist, professor at UC San Diego, known for stabilizing reactive low-valent metal complexes with bulky isocyanide ligands.

Joshua Silver

Joshua Silver is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford who invented self-adjusting eyeglasses, fluid-filled lenses wearers dial to their own prescription, distributed in developing countries.

Joshua Winn

Joshua Winn is an astrophysicist and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton who studies exoplanetary systems, known for measuring spin-orbit alignment and authoring The Little Book of Exoplanets (2023).

Josiah P. Cooke

Josiah P. Cooke was an American chemist and mineralogist who held Harvard's Erving Professorship from 1850 until 1894, known for atomic-weight measurements and pioneering laboratory teaching.

Josiah Whitney

Josiah Dwight Whitney was an American geologist who directed the California Geological Survey from 1860 to 1874 and later taught at Harvard; Mount Whitney is named for him.

Josiah Willard Gibbs

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was an American theoretical physicist and chemist who spent his career at Yale, laying the foundation of chemical thermodynamics with papers published from 1876 to 1878.