100 Notable alumni of University of Gottingen

Georg Michaelis was the imperial chancellor of the German Empire for a few months in 1917. He was the first (and, in the German Empire, the only) commoner to hold the post. With an economic background in business, Michaelis' main achievement was to encourage the ruling classes to open peace talks with Russia. Contemplating that the end of the war...

Johann Heinrich Lambert was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, at that time allied to the Swiss Confederacy, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, physics (particularly optics), philosophy, astronomy and map projections.

Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain was a German physicist, engineer, and the designer of the first aircraft to use a turbojet engine. Together with Frank Whittle and Anselm Franz, he has been described as the co-inventor of the turbojet engine. Additionally, prior to building his engine and filing his own patent in 1935, von Ohain had read and critiqued Whittle's...

Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, commonly known as Baron vom Stein, was a Prussian statesman who introduced the Prussian reforms, which paved the way for the unification of Germany. He promoted the abolition of serfdom, with indemnification to territorial lords; subjection of the nobles to manorial imposts; and the establishment of a modern municipal system.

Peter Simon Pallas FRS FRSE was a Prussian zoologist, botanist, ethnographer, explorer, geographer, geologist, natural historian, and taxonomist. He studied natural sciences at various universities in early modern Germany and worked primarily in the Russian Empire between 1767 and 1810.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel was a German scholar, critic, Orientalist, Indologist, translator and poet. With his brother Friedrich Schlegel, he was a leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His translations of Shakespeare turned the English dramatist's works into German classics.

Alexander, Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe is the head of the House of Schaumburg-Lippe.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger [zaˈbiːnə ˈlɔʏthɔʏsɐ ˈʃnaʀənˌbɛɐ̯ɡɐ] is a German politician of the liberal Free Democratic Party and a prominent advocate of human rights in Germany and Europe. Within the FDP, she is a leading figure of the social-liberal wing. She served as Federal Minister of Justice of Germany from 1992 to 1996 in the cabinet of Helmut Kohl and again in...

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was a German lawyer, jurist, journalist, writer, and proponent of Living Latin. He is today regarded as a pioneer of sexology and the modern gay rights movement. Ulrichs has been described as the "first gay man in world history", and separately as "probably the most famous proponent of Living Latin."

Gustav Ludwig Hertz was a German experimental physicist who shared the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics with James Franck "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom".

Adolph Franz Friedrich Ludwig Freiherr Knigge was a German writer, Freemason, and a leading member of the Order of the Illuminati.

Gottfried Semper was a German architect, art critic, and professor of architecture who designed and built the Semper Opera House in Dresden between 1838 and 1841. In 1849 he took part in the May Uprising in Dresden and was put on the government's wanted list. He fled first to Zürich and later to London. He returned to Germany after the...

August Friedrich Leopold Weismann was a German evolutionary biologist. Fellow German Ernst Mayr ranked him as the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century, after Charles Darwin. Weismann became the Director of the Zoological Institute and the first Professor of Zoology at Freiburg.

Melanie Brinkmann is a German virologist. Until 2019 she was probably best known in connection with her work on the Cytomegalovirus. During 2020 she emerged as a much consulted expert-pundit for media commentators keen to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Brinkmann took a robust public position in the campaign against pandemic misinformation: she described the so-called "virus of false information" as...

Jürgen Moltmann was a German Reformed theologian who was a professor of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen and was known for his books such as the Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, God in Creation and other contributions to systematic theology. His works were translated into many languages.

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German–American theoretical physicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. One half of the prize was awarded jointly to Goeppert Mayer and Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure". She was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first being Marie...

Stephan Weil is a German politician and the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Lower Saxony. On 20 January 2013, the SPD and the Green party won the 2013 Lower Saxony state election by one seat. On 19 February 2013, he was elected Minister President of Lower Saxony with the votes of SPD and Alliance '90/The Greens. From 1...

Richard, 6th Prince of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg was the head of the House of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg and husband of Princess Benedikte of Denmark.

Johannes Friedrich Miescher was a Swiss physician and biologist. He was the first scientist to isolate nucleic acid in 1869. Miescher also identified protamine and made several other discoveries.

Irving Langmuir was an American chemist, physicist, and metallurgical engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry.

Ernst Gräfenberg was a German-born physician and scientist. He developed the intrauterine device (IUD), and studied the role of the woman's urethra in orgasm. The G-spot is named after him.

Ernst Karl Abbe HonFRMS, was a German businessman, optical engineer, physicist, and social reformer. Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, he developed numerous optical instruments. He was also a co-owner of Carl Zeiss AG, a German manufacturer of scientific microscopes, astronomical telescopes, planetariums, and other advanced optical systems.

Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild was a British Jewish banker, politician and philanthropist who was a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England. He became the first practising Jew to sit as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.

Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind was a German mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, abstract algebra (particularly ring theory), and the axiomatic foundations of arithmetic. His best known contribution is the definition of real numbers through the notion of Dedekind cut. He is also considered a pioneer in the development of modern set theory and of the philosophy of...

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the "founder of racial classifications".

August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer.

William Smith Clark was an American professor of chemistry, botany, and zoology; a colonel during the American Civil War; and a leader in agricultural education. Raised and schooled in Easthampton, Massachusetts, Clark spent most of his adult life in Amherst, Massachusetts. He graduated from Amherst College in 1848 and obtained a doctorate in chemistry from Georgia Augusta University in Göttingen...

Count Kirill Grigoryevich Razumovsky or Razumovski was a Russian statesman of Ukrainian Cossack origin who served as the last hetman of the Zaporozhian Host on both sides of the Dnieper (from 1750 to 1764) and then as a General field marshal in the Imperial Russian Army. Razumovsky was also the president of the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences from...

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. He was the first person in Germany to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books" or "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the tree-like electrical discharge...

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German literary critic, philosopher, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.

Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence under the pseudonym of Monsieur Le Blanc with famous mathematicians, such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss. One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she...

Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge was the tenth child and seventh son of King George III of the United Kingdom and Queen Charlotte. He held the title of Duke of Cambridge from 1801 until his death. From 1816 to 1837, he served as Viceroy of the Kingdom of Hanover on behalf of his elder brothers King George IV and King...

Matthias Jakob Schleiden was a German botanist and co-founder of cell theory, along with Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow. He published some poems and non-scientific work under the pseudonym Ernst.

Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, was the sixth son and ninth child of King George III and his queen consort, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He was the only surviving son of George III who did not pursue an army or navy career. A Whig, he was known for his liberal views, which included reform of Parliament, abolition of the slave...

Theodore von Kármán was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The human-defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.

August Heinrich Hoffmann was a German poet associated with the Young Germany movement. He is best known for writing "Das Lied der Deutschen", whose third stanza is now the national anthem of Germany, and a number of popular children's songs.

Jürgen Trittin is a German Green politician who served as Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005.

Marian Adam Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French military intelligence.

Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship (except for a single phrase) of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished multi-volume theological summa the Church Dogmatics (published between 1932 and 1967). Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm...

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and, to some extent,...

Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, was the second son of George III, King of the United Kingdom and Hanover, and his consort Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. A soldier by profession, from 1764 to 1803 he was Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück in the Holy Roman Empire. From the death of his father in 1820 until his own death in 1827, he...

Thomas Young FRS was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.

Ludwig I or Louis I was King of Bavaria from 1825 until the 1848 revolutions in the German states. When he was crown prince, he was involved in the Napoleonic Wars. As king, he encouraged Bavaria's industrialization, initiating the Ludwig Canal between the rivers Main and the Danube. In 1835, the first German railway was constructed in his domain, between...

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1949, the university was named after him and his younger brother, Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist.

Zhu De was a Chinese general, military strategist, politician and revolutionary in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, gallicised and known in Western sources as Élie Metchnikoff, was a zoologist from the Russian Empire of Moldavian noble ancestry best known for his research in immunology (study of immune systems) and thanatology (study of death). He and Paul Ehrlich were jointly awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "in recognition of their work on...

Luisa-Marie Neubauer is a German climate activist, politician, and author. She is one of the main organizers of the school strike for climate movement in Germany, where it is commonly referred to under its alternative name Fridays for Future. She advocates a climate policy that complies with and surpasses the Paris Agreement and endorses de-growth. Neubauer is a member of...

Dee Bradley Baker is an American voice actor. Much of his work has consisted of vocalizations of animals and monsters. Baker's roles include animated series such as Adventure Time, American Dad!, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Ben 10, Codename: Kids Next Door, The Fairly OddParents, Gravity Falls, Handy Manny, Jungle Junction, Miles from Tomorrowland, Milo Murphy's Law, Muppet Babies, My Friends...

Ernest Augustus was King of Hanover from 20 June 1837 until his death in 1851. As the fifth son of George III of the United Kingdom and Hanover, he initially seemed unlikely to become a monarch, but none of his older brothers had a legitimate son. When his brother William IV, who ruled both kingdoms, died in 1837, his niece...

Matthias Reim is a German pop and Schlager singer. His 1990 single "Verdammt, ich lieb' dich" ("Damn, I love you") was a hit in several European countries and spent 16 consecutive weeks at the number 1 spot in the German charts. He unexpectedly returned 23 years later to the top on the charts with "Unendlich" in 2013.

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician who made profound contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first rigorous formulation of the integral, the Riemann integral, and his work on Fourier series. His contributions to complex analysis include most notably the introduction of Riemann surfaces, breaking...

Sigmar Hartmut Gabriel is a German politician who was the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2017 to 2018 and the vice-chancellor of Germany from 2013 to 2018. He was Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 2009 to 2017, which made him the party's longest-serving leader since Willy Brandt. He was the Federal Minister of the...

Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German politician (CDU), who served as President of Germany from 1984 to 1994. Born into the aristocratic Weizsäcker family, he took his first public offices in the Protestant Church in Germany.

Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. He won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis".

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern...

Enrico Fermi was an Italian and naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical...

Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design inspired by Stanisław Ulam.

Frauke Petry is a German far right politician who chaired the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party from July 2015 to September 2017. A chemist by training and with a professional background as a businesswoman, some political scientists described Petry as a representative of the national conservative wing of that party.

John Pierpont Morgan Sr. was an American financier and investment banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. As the head of the banking firm that ultimately became known as JPMorgan Chase & Co., he was a driving force behind the wave of industrial consolidations in the United States at the turn of...

Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder is a German former politician and lobbyist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. From 1999 to 2004, he was also the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). As chancellor, he led a coalition government of the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens. Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for...

Dieter Bohlen is a German songwriter, producer, singer and television personality. He first achieved fame as a member of the pop duo Modern Talking in the 1980s, and has since produced numerous German and international artists. He is also a judge on casting shows Deutschland sucht den Superstar and Das Supertalent.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist who served as the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in overseeing the development of the first nuclear weapons.

Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg was a German statesman and diplomat who oversaw the unification of Germany and served as its first chancellor from 1871 to 1890. Bismarck's Realpolitik and firm governance earned him the nickname Iron Chancellor (Eiserner Kanzler).

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician, astronomer, geodesist, and physicist, who contributed to many fields in mathematics and science. His mathematical contributions spanned the branches of number theory, algebra, analysis, geometry, statistics, and probability. Gauss was director of the Göttingen Observatory in Germany and professor of astronomy from 1807 until his death in 1855.

Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is a German politician and physician who has served as President of the European Commission since 2019. She served in the German federal government between 2005 and 2019, holding positions in Angela Merkel's cabinet, most recently as Federal Minister for Defence. She is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its affiliated...

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Max Theodor Felix von Laue was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 "for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals".

Peter Struck was the German Minister of Defence under chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 2002 to 2005. A lawyer, Struck was a member of the Social Democratic Party.

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German...

Constantin Carathéodory was a Greek mathematician who spent most of his professional career in Germany. He made significant contributions to real and complex analysis, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. He also created an axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics. Carathéodory is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his era and the most renowned Greek mathematician since antiquity.

Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl was a German mathematician, theoretical physicist, logician and philosopher. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland, and then Princeton, New Jersey, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by Carl Friedrich Gauss, David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.

Sandra Ciesek is a German physician and virologist. She is the director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the Universitätsklinikum Frankfurt and professor of medical virology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Her main areas of research include new forms of therapy for hepatitis C and, more recently, the search for drugs against COVID-19.

Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien was a German physicist who used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.

Henriette Reker is a German lawyer and independent politician. She is known for her pro-immigration stance and for being the victim of an assassination attempt in 2015. A day after the attack, Reker was elected mayor of Cologne after gaining 52.66% of the votes, becoming the first woman to hold the office. Reker was re-elected in 2020. Her term as...

William Backhouse Astor Sr. was an American business magnate who inherited most of his father John Jacob Astor's fortune. He worked as a partner in his father's successful export business. His massive investment in Manhattan real estate enabled major donations to the Astor Library in the East Village, which became the New York Public Library.

James Franck was a German–American atomic physicist who shared the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom."

Caspar Rudolph Ritter von Jhering was a German jurist. He is best known for his 1872 book Der Kampf ums Recht (The Struggle for Law), as a legal scholar, and as the founder of a modern sociological and historical school of law. His ideas were important to the subsequent development of the "jurisprudence of interests" in Germany.

Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya was a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was a pioneer of equality for women in mathematics. Kovalevskaya was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics, in the modern sense of that term, the first woman in Europe in modern times appointed to a full professorship in...

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She also proved Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. Noether was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl, and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians...

Max Born was a German–British theoretical physicist who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics, and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Walther Bothe "for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for...

Maximilian Carl Emil Weber was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist who was one of the central figures in the development of sociology and the social sciences more generally. His ideas continue to influence social theory and research.

Wolfgang Kapp was a German conservative and nationalist and political activist who is best known for his involvement in the eponymous 1920 Kapp Putsch. He spent most of his career working for the Prussian Ministry of Finance and then as director of the Agricultural Credit Institute in East Prussia. During World War I, Kapp was a vocal annexationist and critic...

Carl Peters was a German explorer and colonial administrator. He was a major promoter of the establishment of the German colony of East Africa (part of today’s Tanzania) and one of the founders of the German East Africa Company. He was a controversial figure in Germany for his views and his brutal treatment of native Africans, which ultimately led to...

William II was the last King of Württemberg. He ruled from 6 October 1891 until the dissolution of the kingdom on 30 November 1918. He was the last German ruler to abdicate in the wake of the November Revolution of 1918.

Margot Käßmann is a Lutheran theologian, who was Landesbischöfin (bishop) of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover in Germany. On 28 October 2009, she was also elected to lead the Protestant Church in Germany, a federation of Protestant church bodies in Germany. She stepped down from both offices on 24 February 2010 following a drink-driving incident. After serving as a "Reformation...

Thomas Ludwig Albert Oppermann was a German politician and member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). From October 2017 until his death, he served as Vice President of the Bundestag. In his earlier career, he served as First Secretary (2007–2013) and later as chairman (2013–2017) of the SPD Parliamentary Group in the Bundestag.

Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, FRS was a German-British biologist, physician and biochemist. He was a pioneer scientist in the study of cellular respiration, a biochemical process in living cells that extracts energy from food and oxygen and makes it available to drive the processes of life. He is best known for his discoveries of two important sequences of chemical reactions...

Kurt Matthias Robert Martin Hahn was a German educator. He was decisive in founding Stiftung Louisenlund, Schule Schloss Salem, Gordonstoun, Outward Bound, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, and the first of the United World Colleges, Atlantic College.

Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst who practiced in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views, specifically in theories of sexuality and of the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis. Horney is also credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud's theory of penis envy. She disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the...

Paul Ehrlich was a German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology and antimicrobial chemotherapy. He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Élie Metchnikoff "in recognition of their work on immunity". Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing an important modification of the technique for...

Edith Stein OCD was a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She was murdered in the gas chamber at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.

Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory. Halbwachs also contributed to the sociology of knowledge with his La Topographie Legendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte, a study of the spatial infrastructure of the New Testament (1951).

André Weil was a French mathematician, known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. His influence is due both to his original contributions to a remarkably broad spectrum of mathematical theories, and to the mark he left on mathematical practice and style, through some of...

Cahit Arf was a Turkish mathematician. He is known for the Arf invariant of a quadratic form in characteristic 2 (applied in knot theory and surgery theory) in topology, the Hasse–Arf theorem in ramification theory, Arf semigroups and Arf rings.

Andreas Meyer-Landrut is a former German diplomat. He was West Germany's ambassador to the Soviet Union in Moscow from 1980 to 1983 and again from 1987 to 1989. He also served as the chief of staff to the office of the President of Germany during the presidency of Richard von Weizsäcker from 1989 to 1994.

George Pólya was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education. He has been described as one of The...

Paul Ehrenfest was an Austrian theoretical physicist who made major contributions to statistical mechanics and its relation to quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem. He befriended Albert Einstein on a visit to Prague in 1912 and became a professor in Leiden, where he frequently hosted Einstein. Suffering from depression, in 1933 Ehrenfest killed his...