Best Mid 20TH Century
Yakov Zeldovich was a prominent Soviet physicist renowned for his contributions to cosmology and theoretical physics. His research significantly advanced understanding of the early universe, nuclear reactions, and black hole dynamics. He developed key concepts in hydrodynamic theory applicable acros...
Allan Rex Sandage was an American observational astronomer who took over Edwin Hubble's cosmological research program at the Palomar Observatory. He spent several decades attempting to measure the Hubble constant to determine the exact age and expansion rate of the universe. In 1960, Sandage and Tho...
Lyman Spitzer Jr. was an American theoretical physicist and astronomer whose work contributed to plasma physics, stellar dynamics, and the study of interstellar matter. In 1946 he proposed placing a large astronomical observatory above Earth's atmosphere, decades before an orbiting space telescope b...
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. is an American astrophysicist who received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Russell Hulse for their 1974 discovery of a binary pulsar system. Using the Arecibo radio telescope, they observed the pulsar PSR B1913+16 orbiting another neutron star, and measured chan...
Viktor Ambartsumian was a Soviet Armenian astrophysicist who lived from 1908 to 1996 and became a major figure in twentieth-century astronomy. He founded the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Armenia in 1946 and made influential contributions to stellar dynamics, galactic astronomy, and the stud...
Russell Alan Hulse (born 1950) is an American physicist who, as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discovered the first binary pulsar (PSR B1913+16) in 1974 together with his thesis advisor Joseph Taylor. The discovery provided the first indirect evidence for the existenc...
Iosif Shklovsky (1916–1985) was a Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist who made significant contributions to theoretical astrophysics and radio astronomy. He is best known for demonstrating that the radio emission from the Crab Nebula is synchrotron radiation generated by electrons moving at near-li...
Ian Aird was a British surgeon and medical author who lived from 1905 to 1962 and worked at institutions including Hammersmith Hospital in London. He is particularly associated with A Companion in Surgical Studies, a wide-ranging reference text written for postgraduate surgical training and professi...
Why this score?
Companion in Surgical Studies was influential; respected educator, less major operative innovator.
Scoring methodology
Fred Lawrence Whipple (1906-2004) was an American astronomer who made significant contributions to the study of comets and meteors. While working at Harvard College Observatory, he proposed in 1950 the 'icy conglomerate' model (popularly known as the 'dirty snowball' theory) suggesting that comet nu...
Francis C. Grant was an American neurosurgeon associated with the University of Pennsylvania and the development of neurosurgery as a distinct clinical specialty in the United States. He served on the faculty of the university's medical school and treated disorders requiring surgery of the brain and...
Why this score?
Early University of Pennsylvania neurosurgical figure; respected but less prominent than top founders.
Scoring methodology
Hermann Bondi was an Austrian-born British mathematician and cosmologist who made important contributions to general relativity and the study of the universe. In 1948, he and Thomas Gold formulated the steady-state theory alongside related work by Fred Hoyle, proposing continuous matter creation in...
Otto Struve (1897-1963) was a Russian-born American astronomer known for research in stellar spectroscopy, binary stars, and interstellar matter. A member of the Struve astronomical dynasty, he emigrated to the United States after the Russian Civil War and built much of his career at the University...
William Wilson Morgan (1906–1994) was an American astronomer associated with Yerkes Observatory and the University of Chicago. He co-developed the MKK system of stellar spectral classification with Philip Keenan and Edith Kellman, published in 1943, which became a fundamental tool in modern astronom...
Loyal Davis was an American neurosurgeon who led the neurosurgery department at Northwestern University Medical School and practiced at affiliated Chicago hospitals. His professional work included surgery and writing on disorders of the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves, and he held leadersh...
Why this score?
Northwestern neurosurgery leader; better known publicly through family connection than landmark surgical innovation.
Scoring methodology
Jesse L. Greenstein was an American astronomer whose research centered on stellar spectroscopy and the physical properties of stars. Working at the California Institute of Technology, he made important studies of white dwarfs, stellar chemical composition, and unusual stellar spectra, and he partici...
Donald Osterbrock (1924–2007) was an American astronomer who served as the director of the Lick Observatory in California. He was a leading authority on the physics of gaseous nebulae and active galactic nuclei, notably authoring the standard reference textbook Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Ac...
Nikolai Kardashev was a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist who made foundational contributions to the fields of experimental and theoretical radio astronomy. He is best known for proposing the Kardashev scale in 1964, a theoretical method of classifying extraterrestrial civilizations based on the amo...
Collier's World Atlas and Gazetteer is an American reference atlas issued by P. F. Collier & Son during the mid-20th century. It combines maps showing political boundaries and geographic features with a gazetteer, or alphabetical place-name index, so readers can identify and locate places represente...
Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer associated with the Carnegie Institution whose work helped establish distances beyond the Milky Way. She made photometric measurements of Cepheid variable stars in nearby galaxies, using the relationship between a Cepheid's pulsation period and intrins...
