Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970s he was a co-inventor of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) which explains the confinement of quarks in mesons and baryons and forms a large part of the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and the University of Miami, and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient.
Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
The Dirac Medal is the name of four awards in the field of theoretical physics, computational chemistry, and mathematics, awarded by different organizations, named in honour of Professor Paul Dirac, one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th century.
Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University, and is a member of the board of sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
VictorFrederick "Viki" Weisskopf was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Niels Bohr. During World War II he was Group Leader of the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and he later campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Edwin Ernest Salpeter was an Austrian–Australian–American astrophysicist.
Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism. The other half was split equally between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
Tullio Eugenio Regge was an Italian theoretical physicist.
Feza Gürsey was a Turkish mathematician and physicist. Among his contributions to theoretical physics, his work on the chiral model and on SU(6) symmetry of the quark model are the most well-known.
Gregory Breit was a Russian-born Jewish American physicist and professor at New York University (1929–1934), University of Wisconsin–Madison (1934–1947), Yale University (1947–1968), and University at Buffalo (1968–1973). In 1921, he was Paul Ehrenfest's assistant in Leiden University.
Maurice Goldhaber was an American physicist, who in 1957 established that neutrinos have negative helicity.
John Clive Ward, was a Anglo-Australian physicist who made significant contributions to quantum field theory, condensed-matter physics, and statistical mechanics. Andrei Sakharov called Ward one of the titans of quantum electrodynamics.
Richard Henry Dalitz, FRS was an Australian physicist known for his work in particle physics.
Robert Eugene Marshak was an American physicist, educator, and eighth president of the City College of New York.
Helen Rhoda Arnold Quinn is an Australian-born particle physicist and educator who has made major contributions to both fields. Her contributions to theoretical physics include the Peccei–Quinn theory which implies a corresponding symmetry of nature and contributions to the search for a unified theory for the three types of particle interactions. As Chair of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences, Quinn led the effort that produced A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas—the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by many states. Her honours include the Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, the Oskar Klein Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, appointment as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia, the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics from the American Physical Society, the Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics from the American Institute of Physics, and the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute.
Nicholas Kemmer was a Russian-born nuclear physicist working in Britain, who played an integral and leading edge role in United Kingdom's nuclear programme, and was known as a mentor of Abdus Salam – a Nobel laureate in physics.
Hartland Sweet Snyder was an American physicist who, together with Robert Oppenheimer, showed how large stars would collapse to form black holes. This work modeled the gravitational collapse of a pressure-free homogeneous fluid sphere and found that it would unable to communicate with the rest of the universe. This discovery was depicted in the movie Oppenheimer, where Snyder was portrayed by actor Rory Keane. Historian of physics David C. Cassidy assessed that this prediction of black holes might have won a Nobel Prize in Physics had the authors been alive in the 1990s when evidence was available.
Pierre Ramond is distinguished professor of physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He initiated the development of superstring theory.
The University of Miami Center for Theoretical Studies was established in 1965 under the direction of Behram Kurşunoğlu, with guidance from J. Robert Oppenheimer and with the support of the University's President Henry King Stanford. The purpose of the Center was to provide a forum for studies in theoretical physics and related fields, to be carried out by short term visitors, postdoctoral researchers, long term members of the Center, and various faculty of the University. Among others, the long term resident members of the Center included Paul Dirac (1969–1972) and Lars Onsager (1972–1976), while the affiliated faculty included Physics Professors Arnold Perlmutter and Kursunoglu.
