Physical world and mathematics

Friedrich Schottky

Friedrich Hermann Schottky (1851–1935) was a German mathematician who worked on Abelian and automorphic functions, known for Schottky groups, Schottky's theorem, and the Schottky problem of characterizing Jacobian varieties.

Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander

Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander (1799–1875) was a German astronomer and director of the Bonn Observatory, best known for the Bonner Durchmusterung, a survey of 324,198 stars.

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, known as Wilhelm Bessel, was a self-taught German astronomer who in 1838 made the first accepted measurement of stellar distance, the parallax of 61 Cygni.

Friedrich Wilhelm Levi

Friedrich Wilhelm Levi (1888–1966) was a German mathematician known as a founder of infinite abelian group theory; driven from Leipzig by the Nazis, he rebuilt his career in Calcutta.

Friedrich Wöhler

Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882) was a German chemist and professor at the University of Göttingen, known for his 1828 synthesis of urea from ammonium cyanate and for isolating aluminum, beryllium, and yttrium.

Oct 15, 2026

Friendship graph

A friendship graph, also called a windmill graph, is a graph in which every two vertices have exactly one common neighbor, always triangles sharing one center.

Friendship paradox

The friendship paradox is the statement that, on average, an individual's friends have more friends than the individual, first formalized by sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991.

Fries rearrangement

The Fries rearrangement is an organic reaction in which a phenolic ester is converted under acidic conditions into hydroxyaryl ketones, first reported by Karl Fries in 1908.

Frigyes Riesz

Frigyes Riesz (Frédéric Riesz, 1880–1956) was a Hungarian mathematician and founder of functional analysis, known for the Riesz–Fischer theorem, the Riesz representation theorem, and the theory of subharmonic functions.

Fringe projection profilometry

Fringe projection profilometry is a non-contact, non-interferometric optical technique that measures 3D surface shape by projecting fringes onto an object and analyzing how the surface deforms them.

Fringe science

Fringe science is scientific inquiry that departs from mainstream theories and methods while still presenting itself as science, differing from pseudoscience in attempting the scientific method.

Fringe shift

A fringe shift is a displacement of an interference pattern caused by a change in the optical path difference between two beams, and is the working signal of interferometry.

Frits Zernike

Frits Zernike (1888–1966) was a Dutch physicist at the University of Groningen who won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics for the phase contrast microscope.

Fritz Arndt

Fritz Arndt (1885–1969) was a German chemist known for the Arndt–Eistert synthesis of carboxylic acids and as a pioneer of resonance theory, teaching for over twenty years in Istanbul.

Fritz Carlson

Fritz David Carlson (1888–1952) was a Swedish mathematician known for Carlson's theorem, Carlson's inequality, and the Carlson–Pólya theorem, and professor at Stockholms högskola from 1927.

Fritz Feigl

Fritz Feigl (1891–1971) was an Austrian-born Brazilian analytical chemist who founded spot-test analysis, detecting substances in a single drop, after fleeing Nazi Austria in 1938.

Fritz Foerster

Fritz Foerster (1866–1931) was a German chemist who built the Dresden Technische Hochschule into a leading center of electrochemistry and wrote the standard German textbook on the electrochemistry of aqueous solutions.

Fritz Goos

Fritz Goos was a German physicist at the National Physical Institute in Hamburg who, with Hilda Hänchen, first demonstrated the Goos–Hänchen effect, a small lateral shift of light under total internal reflection, in 1947.

Fritz Haber

Fritz Haber was a German physical chemist who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, and who supervised Germany's first poison-gas attack in World War I.

Fritz Hofmann (chemist)

Fritz Hofmann (Friedrich Carl Albert Hofmann; 1866–1956) was a German chemist at Bayer who first made synthetic rubber on a technical scale, receiving a patent in 1909.

Fritz John

Fritz John (1910–1994) was a German-born American mathematician at New York University known for work on partial differential equations and ill-posed problems, and for the John ellipsoid.

Fritz Kögl

Fritz Kögl was a German organic chemist (1897–1959) who spent his career at Utrecht University, where he identified the plant growth hormone heteroauxin as indole-3-acetic acid in 1934 and crystallized biotin in 1936.

Fritz Kröhnke

Fritz Kröhnke (1903–1981) was a German chemist and professor in Berlin and Freiburg whose Kröhnke pyridine synthesis, discovered with Wilfried Zecher at Giessen in 1961, remains in use.

Fritz Laves

Fritz Laves (1906–1978) was a German-Swiss crystallographer who showed that the Laves phases, a large class of AB₂ intermetallic compounds, arise from close packing of atoms.

Fritz London

Fritz Wolfgang London (1900–1954) was a German-American theoretical physicist who founded quantum chemistry with Walter Heitler in 1927 and, with his brother Heinz, wrote the first theory of superconductivity.

Fritz Noether

Fritz Noether (1884–1941) was a German applied mathematician who worked on hydrodynamics, turbulence, and singular integral equations, and was executed in the Soviet Union in 1941 on fabricated espionage charges.

Fritz Peter

Fritz Peter was a German mathematician and schoolteacher who earned a Göttingen doctorate under Max Born and proved the Peter–Weyl theorem of 1927 with Hermann Weyl.

Fritz Plato

Fritz Plato (1858–1938) was a German chemist and director of the German Institute of Weights and Measures whose 1900 tables gave brewing the degrees Plato scale.

Fritz Pregl

Fritz Pregl (1869–1930) was an Austrian chemist and physician at Graz University who founded quantitative organic microanalysis, analyzing milligram samples, and won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.