Today in Physics

April 15

1874: Johannes Stark
- Nobel Prize in 1919 "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields"
- Bio from the Nobel website

1707: Leonhard Euler
- Besides being the most prolific math writer of all time (800 papers) "He also made major contributions in optics, mechanics, electricity, and magnetism"
- More: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Euler.html
1809: Hermann Grassmann
- "renowned in his day as a linguist and now admired as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, general scholar, and publisher"
- More: http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Hermann_Grassmann.html
1927: Robert Mills
- "as a 27-year-old graduate student, he was a co-writer of what has been called one of the landmark scientific articles of the century, putting forth the Yang-Mills theory, which later made possible major advances in subatomic physics"
- More: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/30/nyregion/robert-l-mills-72-theorist-in-realm-of-subatomic-physics.html

1765: Mikhail Lomonosov
- "Curiously unsung in the West, Lomonosov broke ground in physics, chemistry, and astronomy; won acclaim as a poet and historian; and was a key figure of the Russian Enlightenment."
- More: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/65/2/10.1063/PT.3.1438
2009: Laszlo Tisza
- best known for explaining "the unusual behavior of liquid helium, which results when helium gas is cooled to within a few degrees of absolute zero,"
- More: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/04/21/laszlo_tisza_at_101_professor_at_mit_considered_a_giant_of_modern_physics/
2013: Benjamin Fain
- Physicist and philosopher
- More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Fain