Ernst Straus

Academic genealogy of theoretical physicists

An academic genealogy tree of researchers and scholars in theoretical physics can be constructed by following the pedigree of thesis advisors. If an advisor did not exist, or if the field of physics is unrelated, a link can be constructed by using the university from which the physicist graduated. Of significant interest are genealogy trees containing a physicist of the highest distinction (Nobel Prize in Physics, Fields Medal, or similar merit).

Conventions on this page

"Italic" tells us that the subtree for this name appears in some other place in the tree.
If the PhD date and school is known, it is listed in parenthesis.
Bold typeface is used for Nobel prizes, although it may be preferable to add a notation instead, for typographic reasons.

Format:

[[Full Name]] (school, year of PhD) Other notes. [http....url.where.verifying.information.may.be.found]

If physicists are advised by mathematicians, their genealogy can be readily traced using the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Founding fathers

Max Planck (Munich, 1879, Alexander von Brill)

Max von Laue (Berlin, 1903)

Leo Szilard (Berlin, 1922)

Gustav Hertz (Berlin, 1911)
Walter Schottky(Berlin, 1912)
Walther Bothe (Berlin, 1914)

Albert Einstein (Zurich, 1905)

Ernst Straus(Columbia, 1950)

Arnold Sommerfeld (Königsberg, 1891, v. Lindeman)

Peter Debye (Munich, 1908)
Wilhelm Lenz (Munich, 1911)

Ernst Ising (Hamburg, 1924)
J. Hans D. Jensen (1932, Hamburg)

Gregor Wentzel (Munich, 1921)

Markus E. Fierz (Zürich, 1936)

Frans Cerulus (Zürich, 1954)

Raymond Gastmans (Leuven, 1968)

Antoine Van Proeyen (Leuven, 1978)

Res Jost (Zürich, 1946)

Wolfgang Pauli (1921, Munich)

Nicholas Kemmer (1935, Zurich, also under Gregor Wentzel?)

Ron Shaw (1955, Cambridge)
Sergio Albeverio
Klaus Hepp (1963,Zurich, also Res Jost)

Jürg Fröhlich
Konrad Osterwalder (1970 Zurich, also Res Jost)

Hans A. Bethe (1928, Munich?)

Freeman Dyson(Cornell)
Robert Eugene Marshak (1939?!, Cornell)
Roman Jackiw (1966, Cornell, Hans A. Bethe, & K. G. Wilson )

Stefano Forte (1987 MIT)

Joan Rojo (U Barcelona, Coadv. J. I. Latorre)

John Irwin (1963, Cornell)

P S Epstein

Boris Podolsky (1928 Caltech)

Werner Heisenberg (1923, Munich)

Felix Bloch (1928 Leipzig)
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga?? (Leipzig & Tokio, 1939)
Rudolph E. Peierls

John Bell (Birmingham, 1956) (coadv. Paul Matthews)
Edwin Ernest Salpeter (Birmingham, 1948)

Edward Teller (1929 Leipzig)

Marvin Leonard Goldberger (Chicago, 1948, coadv Fermi?)

Franz Gross (Princeton,1963)

Chen Ning Yang (Chicago, 1948)(coadv Fermi?)
Lincoln Wolfenstein

Hans Kastrup

Thomas Thiemann (Aachen, 1994)
Martin Bojowald (Aachen, 2000)

Reinhard Oehme
Friedwardt Winterberg (Göttingen, 1955)

Karl Bechert (Munich, 1925)
Herbert Froehlich (Munich, 1930)

Sebastian Doniach (Liverpool, 1958)

Walter Franz (Munich, 1934)

L Tewordt (Munster, 1953)

Uwe Brandt (Hamburg, 1969)

H Leschke (Dortmund, 1975)

Heinrich Welker (Munich, 1936)

Max Born (1880, Berlin, Carl Runge)

Friedrich Hund (Göttingen, 1922)

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (Leipzig, 1933)

Karl-Heinz Höcker (Berlin, 1940)

Harry Lehmann (Jena, 1950)

Bert Schroer (Hamburg, 1963)

Bernd A. Berg (Berlin, 1977)

Klaus Pohlmeyer (Hamburg, 1966)

Karl-Henning Rehren (Freiburg, 1984)

Heinz Bilz (Frankfurt, 1958)

Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim (Göttingen, 1923)
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (Göttingen, 1930)
Pascual Jordan (Göttingen, 1924)
Max Delbrück (Göttingen, 1930)

Carsten Bresch (Berlin, 1950)

Siegfried Flügge (Göttingen, 1933)

Achim Weiguny (Freiburg, 1963)
Gerhard Vollmer (Freiburg, 1971)

J. Robert Oppenheimer (Göttingen, 1927)

Melba Phillips (Berkeley, 1933)
Sidney Danicoff (Berkeley, 1936)

Sidney Drell (Urbana, 1949)

Steven Frautschi (Stanford, 1958)

Stephen D Ellis (Caltech, 1971)

David J E Callaway (University of Washington, 1981)

Randall Furlong (Rockefeller, 1987)

Willis Lamb (Berkeley, 1938)

Marlan Scully (Yale, 1965)

Philip Morrison (Berkeley, 1940)
Robert Christy (Berkeley, 1941)
David Bohm (Berkeley, 1943)

Yakir Aharonov (Bristol, 1960)

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (Göttingen, 1931) (Born was formally advisor, but thesis work was done under co-advisor Eugene Wigner as Born was sick)

J. D. Jackson (MIT, 1949)

Gordon L. Kane (Illinois U., Urbana, 1963)

David R. Richards (1971, University of Michigan, 1971)
Howard Haber (1978, University of Michigan, 1978)

Marco Diaz (1992, UC Santa Cruz, 1992)
Heather Logan (1999, UC Santa Cruz, 1999)

Chien-Peng Yuan (University of Michigan

Csaba Balazs (Michigan State University, 1999)
Timothy Tait (Michigan State University, 1999)

J. Lorenzo Diaz-Cruz (University of Michigan, 1989)
Robert Garisto, (University of Michigan, 1992)
James Wells (University of Michigan, 1995)

Brandon Murakami (UC Davis, 2002)
Shrihari Gopalakrishna (UC Davis, 2002)

Christopher Kolda (University of Michigan, 1995)
Graham Kribs (University of Michigan, 1998)
Lian-Tao Wang (University of Michigan, 2002)

F. L. Friedman (MIT, 1949)
Murray Gell-Mann (MIT, 1951)

Kenneth G. Wilson (Caltech,1961)

Michael E. Peskin (Cornell U., 1978)

Sidney R. Coleman (Caltech, 1962)

Leonard Parker (Harvard, 1967)
Stephen B. Fels (Harvard, 1968)
Arnold J. Cantor (Harvard, 1970)
David J. Griffiths (Harvard, 1970)
John E. Mansfield (Harvard, 1970)
Anthony Zee (Harvard, 1970)
Lawrence R. Thebaud (Harvard, 1971)
Wu-Yang Tsai (Harvard, 1971, coadv Julian Schwinger)
Erick J. Weinberg (Harvard, 1973)
James P. Butler (Harvard, 1974)
H. David Politzer (Harvard, 1974)
Eldad Gildener (Harvard, 1975)
Frank De Luccia (Harvard, 1979)
Lee Smolin (Harvard, 1979, coadv. Stanley Deser)
Gerald E. Sobelman (Harvard, 1979)
Fred Posner (Harvard, 1980)
Bernard Grossman (Harvard, 1981)
Jacques Distler (Harvard, 1987)
Stelios M. Smirnakis (Harvard, 1997)
Nathan Salwen (Harvard, 2001)

Christopher T. Hill (Caltech, 1977)
Barton Zwiebach (Caltech, 1983)

Kerson Huang (1953, MIT)

Herbert S. Green (Edinburgh, 1947)
Cheng Kaijia (Edinburgh, 1948)

Niels Bohr (Copenhagen, 1911, C. Christiansen)

Lev Landau (Leningrad U, 1927)

Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov (Institute for Physical Problems, 1951)
Boris L. Ioffe

Mikhail A. Shifman

Mayflower branches, (i.e. North America)

I. I. Rabi (Columbia, 1927; A. Willis (waw AG Webster, waw von Helmholtz))

Julian Schwinger (Columbia, 1939) Schwinger advised over 70 PhD's , according to Wikipedia

Bryce DeWitt (Harvard, 1950)
Ben R. Mottelson (Harvard?, 1950)

Torleif Erik Oskar Ericson (Lund U., 1959)

L. M. Garrido 1955 (¿?) Spanish School genealogy list
Charles M. Sommerfield (Harvard, 1957)

Howard Georgi (Yale, 1971)

John Hagelin (Harvard, 1981) (coadv Sidney Coleman?)
Lawrence J. Hall (Harvard, 1981)

Nima Arkani-Hamed (Berkeley, 1997)

Lisa Randall (Harvard, 1987)

Csaba Csaki (1997)
Matthew D. Schwartz (Princeton, 2003)

Andrew G. Cohen
Ann Nelson
David B. Kaplan

Sheldon Lee Glashow (Harvard, 1959)
Kalyana T. Mahanthappa (Harvard, 1961)
Norman J. M. Horing (Harvard, 1964)
Roy Glauber
Walter Kohn
Wu-Yang Tsai (Harvard, 1971, coadv Sidney Coleman)

Norman F. Ramsey (Columbia, 1940)

Daniel Kleppner

Eric A. Cornell

Carl E. Wieman

Vernon Hughes (Columbia 1950)
Martin L. Perl (Columbia, 1955)

Samuel Chao Chung Ting (Michigan, 1962) also adv. Lw W. Jones

Enrico Fermi (Pisa, 1922; Prof. Luigi Puccianti)

Emilio G. Segrè (Rome, 1928) (Co-Recipient - Nobel Physics 1959)
James Rainwater (1946, Manhattan Project)

Val Logsdon Fitch

Chen Ning Yang (Chicago, 1948) (coadv Teller?)
Geoffrey Chew (Chicago, 1948)

David J. Gross (Berkeley, 1966)

Frank Wilczek

Chetan Nayak (1996, Princeton)
Finn Larsen (1996, Princeton)

Edward Witten

Cumrun Vafa (1985, Princeton)
Eva Silverstein (1996, Princeton)

John H. Schwarz (Berkeley, 1966) Dirac Medal 1989

Michael R. Douglas (Caltech, 1988)
Cosmas Zachos (Caltech, 1979)

Owen Chamberlain (Chicago, 1948) (Co-Recipient - Nobel Physics 1959)
Tsung-Dao Lee (Chicago, 1950)

Richard J. Drachman (Columbia, 1958)
Norman H. Christ (Columbia, 1966)
Carl E. Carlson (Columbia, 1968)
King Yuen B. Ng (Columbia, 1969)
Oleg Tchernyshyov (Columbia, 1998)

Willem Van Rensselaer Malkus (Chicago, 1950)
Jack Steinberger

Melvin Schwartz

Sam Treiman (Chicago, 1952; co-advisor: John Simpson (OW Richardson tree) )

Stephen L. Adler (1964)
Curtis Callan (1964)

Igor R. Klebanov (1986)

Steven S. Gubser (1998)

Peter Woit (1984-5, Princeton (undergrad Harvard))
Juan Maldacena (1996, Princeton)

Steven Weinberg (Princeton, 1957)

Claude Bernard (Harvard, 1976)
John Preskill (Harvard, 1980)

Elias Kiritsis (Caltech 1988)

Gerald Gilbert (Texas, 1986)
Fernando Quevedo (Texas, 1986)

K. Fujikawa (1970)

Marcello Conversi ?

Carlo Rubbia

Jerome I. Friedman (Chicago, 1956)

Friedrich Hasenöhrl (Vienna, 1897)

Erwin Schrödinger (Vienna, 1910)
Karl Herzfeld (Vienna, 1914)

John A. Wheeler (Johns Hopkins, 1933)

Richard P. Feynman (Princeton, 1942)

George Zweig (Caltech, 1963)
Thomas L. Curtright (Caltech, 1977)

Arthur Wightman (Princeton, 1949)

Arthur Jaffe (Princeton, 1966)

Clifford Taubes (Harvard, 1980)

Lawrence Schulman (Princeton, 1967)
Jerrold Marsden (Princeton, 1968)
Barry Simon (Princeton, 1970)
Rafael de la Llave (Princeton, 1983)

Hugh Everett (Princeton, 1956)
Charles Misner (Princeton, 1957)
John R. Klauder (Princeton, 1959)
Kip Thorne (Princeton, 1965)
Robert Geroch (Princeton, 1967)

Abhay Ashtekar (Chicago, 1974)

Jacob D. Bekenstein (Princeton, 1972)
Claudio Bunster (Princeton, 1973) (Formerly Claudio Teitelboim)

Walter Heitler (Munich, 1926)

Norbert Straumann (Zurich, 1961)

Eugene Wigner (1925, Berlin, Michael Polanyi)

John Bardeen (Princeton, 1936)

J. Robert Schrieffer

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (coadv. Max Born)
Marcos Moshinsky
Abner Shimony
Edwin Thompson Jaynes

Henry Augustus Rowland (bachelors Rensselaer, 1870; no Ph.D.) ,

Edwin Hall (Johns Hopkins, 1880)
Frederick A. Saunders (Johns Hopkins, 1899)
Joseph Sweetman Ames (Johns Hopkins, 1890)

Charles E. Mendenhall (Johns Hopkins, 1898) (coadv. Frederick A. Saunders?)

Raymond Thayer Birge (Wisconsin-Madison, 1913)

Edward Condon (Berkeley, 1926)

Edwin McMillan (Princeton, 1932) (chemistry Nobel 1951)
Robert Hofstadter (Princeton, 1938) (Nobel 1961)

August Herman Pfund (Johns Hopkins, 1906)

Richard Threlkeld Cox (Johns Hopkins, 1924)

Clifford Shull (NYU, 1941) (Nobel 1994)

Haldan Keffer Hartline (M.D. Johns Hopkins, 1927) (physiology & medicine Nobel 1967)

William F. Meggers (Johns Hopkins, 1917)

Otto Laporte (Munich, 1924)
Curtis J. Humphreys (Michigan, 1928)

Gregory Breit (Johns Hopkins, 1921)

Charles Kittel (Berkeley, 1941)

Albert Overhauser (Berkeley, 1951)

John Joseph Hopfield (Cornell, 1958)

Bertrand Halperin (Berkeley, 1965)

Daniel S. Fisher (Harvard, 1979)
Catherine Kallin (Harvard, 1984)
Steven H. Simon (Harvard, 1995)
Yaroslav Tserkovnyak (Harvard, 2003)

Morrel H. Cohen (Berkeley, 1952)

James C. Phillips (Chicago, 1956)

Marvin L. Cohen (Chicago, 1964)

John D. Joannopoulos (Berkeley, 1974)

Robert B. Laughlin (MIT, 1979) (Nobel 1998)

Alan M. Portis (Berkeley, 1953)

Alan J. Heeger (Berkeley, 1961) (chemistry Nobel 2000)
N. Phuan Ong (Berkeley)

Frederick Sumner Brackett (Johns Hopkins, 1922)

R. D. Present

Frederick Reines (New York U. 1944)

William R. Kropp (Case Western Reserve, 1964)
Frank A. Nezrick (Case Western Reserve, 1965)

Gilberto Bernardini

Leon Lederman (Columbia, 1951)

Hideki Yukawa (Kyoto, 1938, K Tamaki )

Donald R. Yennie

Stanley J. Brodsky (Minnesota, 1964)
Thomas W. Appelquist (Cornell, 1968)

J. Terrance Goldman (Harvard, 1973)
Michael Dine (Yale, 1978)
Anthony Carmine Longhitano (Yale, 1981)
Dimitra Karabali (Yale, 1986)
Piotr Karasinski (Yale, 1987)
Daniel Joseph Nash (Yale, 1989)
Tatsu Takeuchi (Yale, 1989)
Opher Shapira (Yale, 1990)
George Triantaphyllou (Yale, 1993)
Myckola Schwetz (Yale, 1997)
Zhiyong Duan (Yale, 2001)
Ho-Ung Yee (Yale, 2003)
Yang Bai (Yale, 2007)

Geoffey T. Bodwin (Cornell, 1978)

Modern European branches, and other

Ralph H. Fowler (Cambridge, 1915, Archibald Vivian Hill )

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (Cambridge, 1926)

Dennis W. Sciama (Cambridge, 1953)

George Ellis (Cambridge, 1964)
Stephen Hawking (Oxford, 1966)
Sir Martin Rees (Cambridge, 1967)

Roger Blandford (Cambridge, 1974)

Brandon Carter (Cambridge, 1968)

Patrick Peter (Paris, 1991)
Xavier Martin (Paris, 1995)
Reinhard Prix (Paris, 2000)
Nicolas Chamel (Paris, 2004)

David Deutsch (Oxford, 1978)

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Trinity College, Cambridge, 1933)

Jeremiah P. Ostriker (Chicago, 1964)

Garrett Birkhoff
Noel B. Slater
John Lennard-Jones

Ernest Rutherford (rel J. J. Thomson )

James Chadwick (M.Sc.)

Georges Charpak (College de France, Paris, 1954)

Abdus Salam (Cambridge, 1951, under N. Kemmer and/or P.T. Matthews)

R. Shaw (Cambridge, 1955)
Yuval Neeman (Imperial College, London, 1961)
Ray F. Streater (Imperial College, London, 1960)
Christopher Isham
John Moffat (Cambridge, 1958)
Michael Duff
Ali Chamseddine (Imperial College, 1976)

William R. Franklin

Léon Van Hove

Martinus Veltman (Utrecht, 1963)

Gerardus 't Hooft (1972)

Henry W. Kendall (,1950?, Martin Deutsch)

Richard E. Taylor (,,Alberta)

Ancient lineages

The Born tree leads to Gauß and then to Otto Mencke.

The Sommerfeld tree leads to Felix Klein and then to Otto Mencke (via Gauss) and Leibniz. The Leibniz heritage, however, is due to the premature death of Klein's advisor, Plücker, which forced a second supervisor for the final examination, namely Rudolf Lipschitz.

Another impressive advisor line in continental Europe descends from Leibniz via among others, Poisson, Lagrange, the Bernoullis, and Euler.

The main American branch's lineage proceeds via von Helmholtz to de Volder (Leiden, 1643-1709).

Otto Mencke (a Epicurus scholar, colleague of Leibnitz)

Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen

Christian August Hausen (see http://www.math.vt.edu/people/renardym/comments.html )

Abraham Kaestner

Georg Lichtenberg

Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes (also advised by Kaestner)

Johann Friedrich Pfaff de ortibus et occasibus siderum

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

Heinrich Scherk (also advised by Heinrich Brandes)

Ernst Kummer

Christoph Gudermann

Karl Weierstraß (honorary degree, no PhD)

Carl Runge (also advised by Ernst Kummer)

Max Born

Christian Ludwig Gerling ..ad calculos parallacticos facilitandos explicavit simulque eclipsin solarem die .

Julius Plücker ... quae geometriae altioris et mechanicae basis et fundamenta sunt e serie Tayloria deducit

C. Felix Klein (also advised by Rudolf Lipschitz the last year)

C. L. Ferdinand Lindemann 1873, Erlangen,

Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld Die willkürlichen Functionen in der mathematischen Physik Universität Königsberg 1891
David Hilbert Universität Königsberg 1885
Martin Kutta München 1900
Hermann Minkowski Königsberg 1885