This book is ideal for anyone who would like to read about the lives of some of the most remarkable physicists born since the second half of the seventeenth century. Each of the fifty-five physicists profiled have made important contributions to physics, through their ideas and teaching, or in other ways. The biographies are arranged chronologically by the physicists' dates of birth, so that, when read in sequence, they convey how physics developed over time. However, the book emphasizes their varied life stories, not the details of their achievements. Ioan James is Professor at the...

Ioan James celebrates the extraordinary contribution made by Jewish people in mathematics and physics, from the mathematician Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, to distinguished nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Niels Bohr. He tells the life-stories of thirty-five men and women, born in the nineteenth century, who were at the forefront of research in the closely related fields of mathematics and physics, often in the face of various kinds of anti-Semitism.
Some were caught up in the trauma of the Nazi accession to power in Germany and the Second World War. Wolfgang Pauli,...