Physical world and mathematics

Larry Smarr

Larry Smarr, born 1948, is an American computational scientist who founded NCSA at Illinois and Calit2 at UC San Diego, and pioneered quantified-self health research.

Lars Ahlfors

Lars Ahlfors was a Finnish mathematician who worked in complex analysis and Riemann surfaces, won one of the first two Fields Medals in 1936, and taught at Harvard from 1946 to 1977.

Lars Bildsten

Lars Bildsten is an American theoretical astrophysicist who directs the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara and studies stellar explosions and gravitational waves.

Lars Bojer Madsen (born 1970) is a Danish theoretical physicist and professor at Aarhus University, known for strong-field ionization theory and attosecond physics, elected an American Physical Society Fellow in 2018.

Lars Edvard Phragmén

Lars Edvard Phragmén (1863–1937) was a Swedish mathematician known for the Phragmén–Lindelöf principle in complex analysis and a load-balancing proportional election method still part of Swedish law.

Lars Gårding

Lars Gårding (1919–2014) was a Swedish mathematician and professor at the University of Lund from 1952 to 1984, known for Gårding's inequality and for advising Lars Hörmander.

Sep 20, 2026

Lars Hernquist

Lars Hernquist is a theoretical astrophysicist, the Mallinckrodt Professor at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, known for galaxy-formation simulations including Illustris and IllustrisTNG, and a 2020 Gruber Cosmology Prize recipient.

Lars Hörmander

Lars Hörmander (1931–2012) was a Swedish mathematician at Lund University, the leading figure in the theory of linear partial differential equations and winner of the 1962 Fields Medal.

Lars Konermann

Lars Konermann is a chemist and professor at Western University known for protein mass spectrometry and for work on the mechanism of electrospray ionization.

Lars Onsager

Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-born physical chemist and theoretical physicist who won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his reciprocal relations in irreversible thermodynamics.

Lars Sillén

Lars Gunnar Sillén (1916–1970) was a Swedish chemist, professor of inorganic chemistry at KTH in Stockholm, who created the first model of ocean chemistry regulation.

Lars Stixrude

Lars Stixrude is a mineral physicist and professor at UCLA, known for first-principles quantum-mechanical studies of deep-Earth minerals, including a 1993 Nature paper on lower-mantle perovskite stability.

Lars Vegard

Lars Vegard (1880–1963) was a Norwegian physicist, professor at Kristiania/Oslo from 1918 to 1952, known for Vegard's law on mixed crystals and for identifying over 500 auroral spectral lines.

Las Bambas

Las Bambas is a large open-pit copper mine in the Apurímac Region of southern Peru, near Challhuahuacho and about 75 km southwest of Cusco, operated by MMG Limited since 2016.

Oct 22, 2026

Las Colinas landslide

The Las Colinas landslide was a fast-moving flow-slide of volcanic soil triggered by the January 13, 2001 El Salvador earthquake, burying a Santa Tecla neighborhood and killing several hundred people.

Las Cumbres Observatory

Las Cumbres Observatory is a nonprofit observatory in Goleta, California, founded in 2005 by Wayne Rosing, operating 27 robotic telescopes at seven sites worldwide as a single instrument.

LaSalle's invariance principle

LaSalle's invariance principle is a theorem in dynamical systems, due to J. P. LaSalle in the 1950s, giving asymptotic stability from a Lyapunov function with nonpositive derivative.

Laser ablation electrospray ionization

Laser ablation electrospray ionization (LAESI) is an ambient mass spectrometry method, reported in 2007, that analyzes water-rich samples like living plants and single cells with no preparation.

Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry

Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is an analytical technique in which laser pulses vaporize solid samples for elemental and isotopic analysis by ICP-MS.

Laser ablation synthesis in solution

Laser ablation synthesis in solution (LASiS), also called pulsed laser ablation in liquids (PLAL), focuses pulsed laser light onto a solid target in a liquid to make colloidal nanoparticles.

Laser absorption spectroscopy

Laser absorption spectroscopy is an optical technique that scans a narrow-linewidth laser across a gas's absorption lines, identifying species and quantifying concentrations from ppm to ppt in real time.

Laser altimetry

Laser altimetry is a remote sensing method that measures surface elevation from the flight time of laser pulses, used in studies of ice, land, vegetation, and water.

Laser cooling

Laser cooling, or optical refrigeration, is a set of techniques that use laser light to slow atoms and ions, cooling gases to within microkelvin of absolute zero.

Oct 22, 2026

Laser cooling of molecules

Laser cooling of molecules uses repeated absorption and emission of resonant laser light to cool molecular gases, demonstrated from 2010 on SrF and now used for precision measurement and quantum science.

Laser desorption electrospray ionization

Laser desorption electrospray ionization (LDESI) is an ambient ionization method for mass spectrometry, introduced by Shiea and colleagues in 2005, that analyzes unprepared solid samples at atmospheric pressure.

Laser desorption ionization

Laser desorption ionization (LDI) is a mass spectrometry method in which a pulsed laser desorbs and ionizes molecules from a sample surface, including its MALDI variant.

Laser diffraction

Laser diffraction is a particle-sizing technique that converts the angular pattern of laser light scattered by a dispersed sample into a volume-based particle size distribution.

Laser diode

The laser diode, also called a semiconductor or injection laser, is an electrically pumped semiconductor laser used in optical storage, fiber communications, and laser pumping.

Laser diode rate equations

The laser diode rate equations are a pair of coupled differential equations describing carrier and photon densities in a semiconductor laser, yielding threshold current and modulation response.