Carlos Graef Fernández (February 25, 1911 – January 13, 1988) was a Mexican physicist and mathematician. A graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a founding member of the Mexican Mathematical Society and the Mexican Physical Society. He helped to establish the Tonantzintla Observatory and he later directed it. He received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1970.
Donald Delbert Clayton (March 18, 1935 – January 3, 2024) was an American astrophysicist whose most visible achievement was the prediction from nucleosynthesis theory that supernovae are intensely radioactive. That earned Clayton the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1992) for “theoretical astrophysics related to the formation of (chemical) elements in the explosions of stars and to the observable products of these explosions”. Supernovae thereafter became the most important stellar events in astronomy owing to their profoundly radioactive nature. Not only did Clayton discover radioactive nucleosynthesis during explosive silicon burning in stars but he also predicted a new type of astronomy based on it, namely the associated gamma-ray line radiation emitted by matter ejected from supernovae. That paper was selected as one of the fifty most influential papers in astronomy during the twentieth century for the Centennial Volume of the American Astronomical Society. He gathered support from influential astronomers and physicists for a new NASA budget item for a gamma-ray-observatory satellite, achieving successful funding for Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. With his focus on radioactive supernova gas Clayton discovered a new chemical pathway causing carbon dust to condense there by a process that is activated by the radioactivity.Clayton also authored a novel, The Joshua Factor (1985), a parable of the origin of mankind utilizing the mystery of solar neutrinos; a science autobiography and a memoir; and a history of the origin of each isotope, Handbook of Isotopes in the Cosmos (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003).
Clayton died on January 3, 2024, at the age of 88.
Kenneth Marshall Watson (September 7, 1921 – August 18, 2023) was an American theoretical physicist and physical oceanographer.
George E. Collins (January 10, 1928 in Stuart, Iowa – November 21, 2017 in Madison, Wisconsin) was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is the inventor of garbage collection by reference counting[G60]
and of the method of quantifier elimination by cylindrical algebraic decomposition.[G75]He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1955. He worked at IBM, the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1966–1986) Ohio State University, RISC-Linz, Delaware University, and North Carolina State University.
William D. Sellers (18 August 1928 – 27 August 2014) was an American meteorologist, climate scientist, and pioneer of climate modelling. He created one the earliest climate models and was one of the first scientists to recognize the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere on the Earth's climate. He published the textbook "Physical Climatology".
Mervin Edgar Muller (1 June 1928 – 3 December 2018) was an American computer scientist and mathematician. The Box–Muller transform is named after him.
Leonard Carlitz (December 26, 1907 – September 17, 1999) was an American mathematician. Carlitz supervised 44 doctorates at Duke University and published over 770 papers.
Jan Theodoor Gerard Overbeek (Groningen, January 30, 1911 – February 19, 2007) was a Dutch professor of physical chemistry at the Utrecht University.
Jean Abraham Chrétien Oudemans (Amsterdam, 16 December 1827 – Utrecht, 14 December 1906) was a Dutch astronomer. He was the director of the Utrecht Observatory from 1875 until 1898, when he retired.
Oudemans was born in Amsterdam, son of the poet, teacher and philologist Anthonie Oudemans Sr. and Jacoba Adriana Hammecker. He entered Leiden University when he was just 16 as a student of the noted astronomer Frederik Kaiser. He became a high school teacher in Leiden when he was just 19 (1846). The next six years he worked on his dissertation on the determination of the latitude of Leiden. Next he studied asteroids and variable stars, meanwhile hoping for an academic appointment. In 1855 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He married Pauline Adriana Verdam (the daughter of a well-known mathematics professor Gideon Jan Verdam ) in 1856. In the same year he was appointed a professor at Utrecht University and became the first director of its observatory. However, his interest drew him towards geography. He traveled to the Dutch East Indies as head surveyor, and worked in that capacity for 18 years, publishing his works on the triangulation of the island of Java in six books.In 1874 he organized an astronomical expedition to the island of Réunion to observe the transit of Venus but, due to bad weather, the results were disappointing.Oudemans crater on Mars was named in his honor.
A brother was the botanist Corneille Antoine Jean Abram Oudemans. One of his sons was Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans Jzn, one of the fathers of cryptozoology.
Charles Coffin Sims (April 14, 1937 – October 23, 2017) was an American mathematician best known for his work in group theory. Together with Donald G. Higman he discovered the Higman–Sims group, one of the sporadic groups. The permutation group software developed by Sims also led to the proof of existence of the Lyons group (also known as the Lyons–Sims group) and the O'Nan group (also known as the O'Nan–Sims group).
Sims was born and raised in Elkhart, Indiana, and received his B.S. from the University of Michigan. He did his graduate studies at Harvard University, where he was a student of John G. Thompson and received his Ph.D. degree in 1963. In his thesis, he enumerated p-groups, giving sharp asymptotic upper and lower bounds. Sims is one of the founders of computational group theory and is the eponym of the Schreier–Sims algorithm. He was a faculty member at the Department of Mathematics at Rutgers University from 1965 to 2007. During that period he served, in particular, as Department Chair (1982–84) and Associate Provost for Computer Planning (1984–87). Sims retired from Rutgers in 2007 and moved to St. Petersburg, Florida.In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.