Physical and mathematical scientists

Francis E. Low

Francis E. Low (1921–2007) was an American theoretical physicist who worked on quantum electrodynamics at MIT, proved the 1958 soft-photon theorem, and served as provost from 1980 to 1985.

Francis Farley

Francis James Macdonald Farley (1920–2018) was a British experimental physicist who took part in the first four muon g-2 experiments at CERN and Brookhaven, winning the 1980 Hughes Medal.

Francis Galton (1822–1911) was an English polymath and half-cousin of Charles Darwin who founded biometric statistics, introducing correlation and regression to the mean, and also coined the term eugenics.

Francis Graham-Smith

Sir Francis Graham-Smith (1923–2025) was a British radio astronomer who identified cosmic radio sources, researched pulsars, and served as the 13th Astronomer Royal from 1982 to 1990.

Francis Halzen

Francis Halzen, born 1944 in Belgium, is a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who conceived and led the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole.

Francis J. DiSalvo

Francis J. "Frank" DiSalvo (1944–2023) was an American solid-state chemist, a Cornell professor and National Academy of Sciences member known for synthesizing new inorganic materials, including nitrides and fuel-cell electrocatalysts.

Francis J. Pettijohn

Francis J. Pettijohn (1904–1999) was an American geologist often called the father of modern sedimentology, whose 1949 textbook Sedimentary Rocks set the field's standard for decades.

Francis John Turner

Francis John Turner (1904–1985) was a New Zealand-born metamorphic petrologist, professor of geology at Berkeley, and pioneer of structural petrology elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Francis M. McCubbin

Francis M. McCubbin is a planetary scientist and cosmochemist who serves as NASA's Astromaterials Curator at Johnson Space Center, studying water and volatiles in the inner solar system.

Sep 20, 2026

Francis Nimmo

Francis Nimmo is a British-born planetary geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, known for work on the interiors of Pluto, Enceladus, and the Moon.

Francis Parker Shepard

Francis Parker Shepard (1897–1985) was an American marine geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography whose surveys of submarine canyons off La Jolla, California, founded marine geology on the Pacific coast.

Francis R. Boyd

Francis R. Boyd, known to colleagues as Joe, was an American experimental petrologist at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory who developed the pyroxene geotherm for reading the mantle's thermal structure.

Francis Reichelderfer

Francis Reichelderfer was an American meteorologist who served as chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau from 1938 to 1963, introducing radar, numerical weather prediction, and satellites into American forecasting.

Francis Simon

Francis Simon, born Franz Eugen Simon, was a German-British low-temperature physicist who invented a cheap helium liquefier and led British uranium isotope separation during World War II.

Francis Sowerby Macaulay

Francis Sowerby Macaulay (1862–1937) was an English mathematician who, while a schoolmaster at St Paul's School in London, created much of the foundation of commutative algebra.

Francis W. Aston

Francis W. Aston, also known as Francis William Aston, was a British chemist at Cambridge who invented the mass spectrograph and won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering isotopes.

Francis W. Zwiers

Francis Zwiers is a Canadian climate scientist specializing in statistical detection and attribution of climate change, formerly director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria.

Francis Wheeler Loomis

Francis Wheeler Loomis was an American physicist who discovered the isotope effect in molecular spectra in 1920 and headed the University of Illinois physics department from 1929 to 1957.

Francisco de la Cruz

Francisco de la Cruz, born in Barcelona in 1938, is an Argentine condensed-matter physicist at the Instituto Balseiro in Bariloche, known for research on superconductors and magnetic vortices.

Francisco F. Roberto

Francisco F. Roberto, known as Frank Roberto, is a biohydrometallurgist who spent 24 years at Idaho National Laboratory before joining Newmont, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.

Francisco Guinea

Francisco Guinea López, born in Madrid in 1953, is a Spanish theoretical condensed matter physicist at IMDEA Nanociencia known for his work on graphene and strain engineering.

Françisco M. Raymo

Françisco M. Raymo is a chemist at the University of Miami, on the faculty since 2000, who studies photochromic oxazines and fluorescent molecular switches for super-resolution imaging.

Francisco Zaera

Francisco Zaera is a Venezuelan-born surface chemist and Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside, honored with the AVS Medard W. Welch Award in 2024 for catalysis research.

Franck Vernerey

Franck Vernerey is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies soft and biological matter and received a Presidential Early Career Award.

Franco Cacialli

Franco Cacialli is a physicist known for work on organic semiconductor devices including LEDs and photovoltaics, professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano since 2022, previously at University College London.

Sep 20, 2026

Franco Nori

Franco Nori is a theoretical physicist known for work on superconducting qubits and circuit QED, who led a lab at Japan's RIKEN while teaching at the University of Michigan.

François Bruhat

François Bruhat (1929–2007) was a French mathematician who worked on algebraic groups, best known for the Bruhat decomposition, the Bruhat order, and the Bruhat–Tits theory of reductive groups over local fields.

François Cosserat

François Cosserat (1852–1914) was a French railway engineer and mathematician who, with his younger brother Eugène, founded the theory of generalized continua in their 1909 treatise Théorie des corps déformables.

Sep 20, 2026

François Diederich

François Diederich (1952–2020) was a Luxembourg-born organic chemist who was professor of organic chemistry at ETH Zurich from 1992, known for molecular recognition, fullerenes, and fluorine's role in pharmaceuticals.