Academic genealogy of theoretical physicists

The following is an academic genealogy of theoretical physicists and is constructed by following the pedigree of thesis advisors. If an advisor did not exist, or if the field of physics is unrelated, an academic genealogical link can be constructed by using the university from which the theoretical physicist graduated.
An academic genealogy tree lists the physicists' PhD (or in some cases BA/) date and school, if known. Nobel Prize winners are indicated by . If physicists are advised by mathematicians, their genealogy can be readily traced using the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
For the meaning of "s.v.", see .
Founding fathers of modern physics
Niels Bohr
* Niels Bohr (Copenhagen, 1911 under Christian Christiansen)
** Hans Kramers (Leiden, 1919)
*** Tjalling Koopmans (Leiden, 1936)
*** Frederik Belinfante (Leiden, 1939)
**** Jiaxian Deng (Purdue University, 1950; co-advised by Dirk ter Haar)
*** Dirk ter Haar (Leiden, 1948)
**** Anthony James Leggett (Oxford, 1964)
***** Amir Caldeira (University of Sussex, 1980)
***** Jan Engelbrecht (Urbana-Champaign, 1993)
** Lev Landau (postgraduate disciple of Bohr at the Niels Bohr Institute, )
Max Born
* Max Born (Berlin, 1880 under 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)
*** Dieter Langbein (Frankfurt, 1958)
** Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim (Göttingen, 1923)
** Maria Goeppert-Mayer (Göttingen, 1930)
*** Robert G. Sachs (Baltimore, 1939)
** Pascual Jordan (Göttingen, 1924)
*** Jürgen Ehlers (Hamburg, 1958)
*** Wolfgang Kundt (Hamburg, 1958)
**** Rainer Walter Kühne (Bonn, 1995)
** Max Delbrück (Göttingen, 1930)
*** Carsten Bresch (Berlin, 1950)
** Siegfried Flügge (Göttingen, 1933)
*** Hans Marschall (Berlin, 1946)
**** Walter Greiner (Freiburg, 1961)
**** Amand Fäßler (Freiburg, 1963)
*** Achim Weiguny (Freiburg, 1963)
*** Gerhard Vollmer (Freiburg, 1971)
** J. Robert Oppenheimer (Göttingen, 1927)
*** Melba Phillips (Berkeley, 1933)
*** Sidney Dancoff (Berkeley, 1936)
**** Sidney Drell (Urbana, 1949)
***** Steven Frautschi (Stanford, 1958)
****** Roger Dashen (Caltech, 1964)
****** Stephen D. Ellis (Caltech, 1971)
******* David Callaway (University of Washington, 1981)
******** Randall Furlong (Rockefeller, 1987)
*** Willis Lamb (Berkeley, 1938)
**** Marlan Scully (Yale, 1965)
***** Mikhail Lukin (Harvard, 1998)
*** Philip Morrison (Berkeley, 1940)
*** Robert Christy (Berkeley, 1941)
*** David Joseph Bohm (Berkeley, 1943)
**** Yakir Aharonov (Bristol, 1960)
*** J. D. Jackson (MIT, 1949)
**** Gordon L. Kane (Illinois U., Urbana, 1963)
***** David R. Richards (University of Michigan, 1971)
***** Howard Haber (University of Michigan, 1978)
****** Marco Diaz (UC Santa Cruz, 1992)
****** Heather Logan (UC Santa Cruz, 1999)
***** Chien-Peng Yuan (University of Michigan)
****** Csaba Balazs (Michigan State University, 1999)
****** Timothy M. P. Tait (Michigan State University, 1999)
***** J. Lorenzo Diaz-Cruz (University of Michigan, 1989)
***** Robert Garisto, (University of Michigan, 1992)
***** James D. 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)
***** Eric Kuflik (University of Michigan, 2011)
*** F. L. Friedman (MIT, 1949)
**** William Tobocman (MIT, 1953)
***** Anthony J. Baltz (Case Western Reserve, 1971)
*** Murray Gell-Mann (MIT, 1951)
**** Kenneth G. Wilson (Caltech, 1961)
****** Emil Martinec (Cornell, 1984)
****** Matthew J. Strassler (Stanford, 1993)
****** Jonathan L. Feng (Stanford, 1995)
***** Paul Ginsparg (Cornell, 1981)
***** H. R. Krishnamurthy (Cornell, 1976)
**** Sidney R. Coleman (Caltech, 1962)
***** John E. Mansfield (Harvard, 1970)
***** Anthony Zee (Harvard, 1970)
***** Lawrence R. Thebaud (Harvard, 1971)
***** Wu-Yang Tsai (Harvard, 1971; co-adv. Julian Schwinger, )
****** William Daniel Phillips
****** David E. Pritchard
***** Erick J. Weinberg (Harvard, 1973)
****** Kimyeong Lee (Columbia, 1987)
***** James P. Butler (Harvard, 1974)
***** H. David Politzer (Harvard, 1974)
***** Eldad Gildener (Harvard, 1975)
***** Ian K. Affleck (Harvard, 1975)
***** Edward Witten (PhD, Princeton (1976) under David J. Gross, ; post-doctoral studies in Harvard (1976-77) under Sidney Coleman and Oxford (1977-78) under Michael Atiyah—)
***** Frank De Luccia (Harvard, 1979)
***** Lee Smolin (Harvard, 1979; co-adv. Stanley Deser)
** James Rainwater (postgraduate work in the Manhattan Project under Fermi; PhD under John R. Dunning, Columbia, 1946)
** Chen Ning Yang (Chicago, 1948; co-adv. Edward Teller)
** Jack Steinberger (Chicago, 1948)
*** Eric L. Schwartz (Columbia, 1973)
** Geoffrey Chew (Chicago, 1948)
***** John March-Russell (Harvard, 1990; co-advisor Sidney Coleman, )
***** Chetan Nayak (Princeton, 1996)
***** Finn Larsen (Princeton, 1996)
***** Maulik K. Parikh (Princeton, 1998)
**** Edward Witten (PhD, Princeton, 1976; post-doctoral studies in Harvard (1976-77) under Sidney Coleman——and Oxford (1977-8) under Michael Atiyah—)
***** Jonathan Bagger (1983, Princeton)
***** Cumrun Vafa (1985, Princeton)
***** Xiao-Gang Wen (1987, Princeton)
***** Dror Bar-Natan (1991, Princeton)
***** Shamit Kachru (1994, Princeton)
***** Eva Silverstein (1996, Princeton)
***** Sergei Gukov (2001, Princeton
**** Ulf Danielsson (Princeton, 1992)
*** John H. Schwarz (Berkeley, 1966)
**** Anthony Ichiro Sanda (Princeton, 1969)
**** Cosmas Zachos (Caltech, 1979)
**** Michael R. Douglas (Caltech, 1988)
**** Gerald B. Cleaver (Caltech, 1993)
***** John T. Perkins (Baylor, 2005)
***** Matthew B. Robinson (Baylor, 2009)
**** Augusto Sagnotti (Caltech, 1983)
** Tsung-Dao Lee (Chicago, 1950)
*** Stephen L. Adler (1964)
**** John Preskill (Harvard, 1980)
*****Alexios Polychronakos (Caltech, 1987)
***** Elias Kiritsis (Caltech, 1988)
**** Bob Holdom (Harvard 1981)
***** John Terning (Toronto 1990)
**** Gerald Gilbert (Texas, 1986)
**** Fernando Quevedo (Texas, 1986)
**** Scott S. Willenbrock (Texas, 1986)
***** Zack Sullivan (Urbana-Champaign 1998)
**** Ubirajara van Kolck (Texas, 1993)
**** Rafael Lopez-Mobilia (Texas, 1995)
*** Kazuo Fujikawa (Princeton, 1970)
Ralph H. Fowler
* Ralph H. Fowler (MA, Cambridge, 1915 under Archibald Vivian Hill)
**Charles Alfred Coulson (PhD, Cambridge, 1936)
***Peter Higgs (PhD, Kings, 1954)
***Chandra Shekhar Sharma (PhD, Oxford, 1962)
****Mark D. Roberts (PhD, Birkbeck, 1986)
**Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (PhD, Cambridge, 1926) no PhD)
*** Edwin Hall (Johns Hopkins, 1880)
***** Julian Schwinger (Columbia, 1939)
****** Roy Glauber (Harvard, 1949)
****** Walter Kohn (Harvard, 1948)
****** Bryce DeWitt (Harvard, 1950)
******** Edward Farhi (Harvard, 1978)
******** John Hagelin (Harvard, 1981)
******** Lawrence J. Hall (Harvard, 1981)
********* Stephen Hsu (Berkeley, 1991)
********* Nima Arkani-Hamed (Berkeley, 1997)
********** Thomas Gregoire (Berkeley, 2003)
******** Sally Dawson (Harvard, 1981)
******** David B. Kaplan (Harvard, 1985)
******** Lisa Randall (Harvard, 1987)
********* Csaba Csáki (1997)
********* Matthew D. Schwartz (Princeton, 2003)
******** Andrew G. Cohen
******** Ann Nelson (Harvard, 1984)
********* David E. Kaplan (U. Washington, 1999)
****** Lawrence Paul Horwitz (Harvard, 1954)
******* Stuart Raby (Tel Aviv, 1976)
******** Tomas Blazek (Ohio State, 1996)
******** Arash Mafi (Ohio State, 2001)
******** Radovan Dermisek (Ohio State, 2002)
****** Sheldon Lee Glashow (Harvard, 1959)
****** Kalyana T. Mahanthappa (Harvard, 1961)
****** Norman J. M. Horing (Harvard, 1964)
****** Tung-Mow Yan (Harvard, 1968)
****** Wu-Yang Tsai (Harvard, 1971; co-adv. Sidney Coleman, )
***** Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr. (Columbia, 1940)
****** Fritz Rohrlich (Harvard, 1948)
******* Robert E. Pugh (Iowa, 1963)
******** Nathan Isgur (Toronto, 1974)
********* Roman Koniuk (Toronto, 1980)
********* Simon Capstick (Toronto, 1986)
********* Eric S. Swanson (Toronto, 1991)
********** Olga Lakhina (Pittsburgh, 2006)
********** Pok Man Lo (Pittsburgh, 2011)
***** Martin Lewis Perl (Columbia, 1955)
****** Samuel Chao Chung Ting (Michigan, 1962; also advised by Lawrence W. Jones)
Lev Landau
* Lev Landau (diploma, Leningrad State University, 1927; he was a pupil of Niels Bohr () during his graduate studies at the Niels Bohr Institute in 1930-31; Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, D.Sc., 1934, without defending a dissertation)
** Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov (Institute for Physical Problems, 1951)
*** Boris Lukyanchuk (Lebedev Physical Institute, 1979)
** Semyon Gershtein (Institute for Physical Problems, 1958)
** Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov (Institute for Physical Problems, 1948)
*** Lev Gor'kov (Institute for Physical Problems, 1955)
*** Alexander F. Andreev (Institute for Physical Problems, 1964)
**** (Institute for Physical Problems, 1989)
** Evgeny Lifshitz (Kharkiv Polytechnical University, 1934)
*** (Institute for Physical Problems, 1957)
*** Lev Pitaevskii (Institute for Physical Problems, 1958)
** Ilya Lifshitz (Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, 1939)
*** Arnold Kosevich (Kharkiv University, 1954)
*** (Kharkiv University, 1954)
*** (Institute for Physical Problems, 1975)
*** Igor Ya. Erukhimovich (Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering, 1979)
*** (Moscow State University, 1979)
** (Kharkiv Polytechnical University, 1936)
** Veniamin Levich (Moscow State Pedagogical University, 1943)
** (Institute for Physical Problems, 1941)
** Aleksander Ilyich Akhiezer (Kharkiv Polytechnical University, 1936)
*** (Kharkiv National University, 1959)
*** Sergey S. Sannikov (Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, 1963)
**** Marcoen Cabbolet (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2011)
*** (Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, 1964)
**** Steven Duplij (Kharkiv National University, 1983)
*** Yuri Petrovich Stepanovskii (Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, 1969)
*** (Kharkiv National University, 1977)
** Isaak Pomeranchuk (Moscow Institute of Tanning Industry, 1938)
*** Gregory Garibian (Lebedev Physical Institute, 1952)
*** Lev Okun (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 1956)
**** Mikhail Voloshin (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 1977)
**** Nikita Nekrasov (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 1996)
*** (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 1959)
*** Yurii Petrovich Nikitin (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 1963)
** (Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, 1940)
*** Yuri Orlov (Yerevan Physics Institute, 1958)
** (Leningrad State University, D.Sc., 1943)
*** Iya Pavlovna Ipatova (Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, 1955)
** (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 1954)
*** Mikhail A. Shifman (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 1976)
** Mark Azbel (Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, D.Sc., 1958)
Max Planck
* Max Planck (Munich, 1879 under Alexander von Brill)
** Max von Laue (Berlin, 1903)
*** Leo Szilard (Berlin, 1922)
*** Friedrich Beck (Göttingen, 1952)
** Gustav Hertz (Berlin, 1911)
*** Heinz Pose (Halle, 1928)
** Walter Schottky (Berlin, 1912)
** Walther Bothe (Berlin, 1914)
Abdus Salam
* Abdus Salam (Cambridge, 1951 under Nicholas Kemmer and Paul Taunton Matthews—)
** Ron Shaw (Cambridge, 1955)
**** Paul Taunton Matthews (Cambridge, 1950)
***** Faheem Hussain (Imperial College London, 1966)
***** Christopher Isham (Imperial College London, 1969 under Paul Taunton Matthews; post-doctoral studies at ICL under Abdus Salam—)
***** John Stewart Bell (Birmingham, 1956; co-adv. Rudolph E. Peierls—)
**** Richard Dalitz (Cambridge, 1950)
*****Stanley Mandelstam (Birmingham, 1956; also under Paul Taunton Matthews)
****** Colin Wilkin (Birmingham, 1963)
****** Charles Thorn (Berkeley, 1971)
****** Joseph Polchinski (Berkeley, 1980)
***** W. Noel Cottingham (UAB, 1960)
****** Anne-Christine Davis (Bristol, 1975)
******* João Magueijo (Cambridge, 1994)
***** Christopher Hubert Llewellyn Smith (Oxford, 1967)
****** John Wheater (Oxford, 1981)
******* Simon Catterall (Oxford, 1989)
******** Anosh Joseph (Syracuse, 2011)
******* Neil Ferguson (Oxford, 1994)
**** Abdus Salam (Cambridge, 1951; also under Paul Taunton Matthews—)
** Linus Pauling (PhD, Caltech, 1925; post-doctoral studies in Munich)
** Hans A. Bethe (Munich, 1928)
*** Freeman Dyson (grad student at Cornell in 1947; no PhD)
*** David Thouless (Cornell, 1958)
**** J. Michael Kosterlitz (DPhil, Oxford, 1969; post-doctoral studies in Birmingham)
*** John Irwin (Cornell, 1963)
*** Roman Jackiw (Cornell, 1966; co-adv. Kenneth G. Wilson, )
**** Rohana Wijewardhana (MIT, 1984)
**** Stefano Forte (MIT, 1987)
**** Fred Hoyle (Cambridge, year unknown)
***** Cyril Domb (Cambridge, 1949)
****** Michael Fisher (King's College London, 1957)
******* David Robert Nelson (Cornell, 1975)
******** Subir Sachdev (Harvard, 1985)
******* Gunduz Caginalp (Cornell, 1978)
**** John Stewart Bell (Birmingham, 1956; co-adv. Paul Taunton Matthews)
**** Edwin Ernest Salpeter (Birmingham, 1948)
**** (Birmingham, 1950)
***** Joseph I. Kapusta (University of California, Berkeley, 1978)
**** Samuel W. MacDowell (Birmingham, 1958)
**** John F. Reading (Birmingham, 1964) under unknown supervisor))
** Gottfried Leibniz (Erhard Weigel was Leibniz's academic advisor in mathematics (summer school, Jena, 1663); Leibniz was also advised by Jakob Thomasius (BA in philosophy, Leipzig, 1662 advisor), (Dr. jur., Altdorf, 1666 advisor), and Christiaan Huygens (mathematics and physics advisor); Leibniz was also MA in philosophy, Leipzig, 1664, LL.B., Leipzig, 1665, and Dr. phil. hab., Leipzig, 1666 under unknown supervisor; Leibniz was a colleague of Otto Mencke—)
** Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen
************ George Chrystal (BA, Cambridge, 1875)
*********** Edward John Routh (MA, Cambridge, 1857; co-mentor Isaac Todhunter)
************ George Darwin (MA, Cambridge, 1871)
************ John Strutt, Lord Rayleigh (MA, Cambridge, 1868)
************* Jagadish Chandra Bose (BA, Calcutta, 1879; BA, Cambridge, 1884; BSc, London, 1884; DSc, London, 1896; undergraduate studies at Cambridge under Lord Rayleigh)
************* J. J. Thomson (BA, Cambridge, 1880; MA, Cambridge, 1883; co-mentor John Strutt)
************** Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (BA, Cambridge, 1892)
************** Ernest Rutherford (MA, New Zealand, 1893; DSc, New Zealand, 1901; graduate studies at Cambridge c. 1895)
*************** Edward Victor Appleton (MA, Cambridge, 1913; co-mentor J. J. Thomson)
*************** Henry DeWolf Smyth (PhD, Cambridge, 1923)
**************** Rubby Sherr (PhD, Princeton, 1938)
***************** Charles Glashausser (PhD, Princeton, 1966)
****************** Robert Kaita (PhD, Princeton)
******************* Gregory Hammett (PhD, Princeton)
**************** Kenneth Bainbridge (PhD, Princeton, 1929)
***************** Edward Mills Purcell (PhD, Harvard, 1938)
****************** Nicolaas Bloembergen (PhD, Leiden, 1948; graduate studies at Harvard)
******************* Peter Pershan (PhD, Harvard, 1960)
******************* Yuen-Ron Shen (PhD, Harvard, 1963)
******************* Eli Yablonovitch (PhD, Harvard, 1972)
****************** George Pake (PhD, Harvard, 1948)
****************** Charles Pence Slichter (PhD, Harvard, 1949)
************** Owen Willans Richardson (ScD, University College London, 1904)
*************** Clinton Davisson (PhD, Princeton, 1911)
*************** Karl Taylor Compton (PhD, Princeton, 1912)
**************** John Quincy Stewart (PhD, Princeton, 1919)
**************** Philip M. Morse (PhD, Princeton, 1929)
**************** Carl Eckart (PhD, Princeton, 1925)
************** Charles Glover Barkla (Liverpool alumnus. c. 1899; advanced studies at Cambridge)
************** Francis William Aston (Birmingham alumnus. c. 1903; advanced studies at Cambridge)
************** George Paget Thomson (Cambridge alumnus, c. 1914)
*************** Ishrat Hussain Usmani (PhD, Imperial College London, 1939)
************** William Henry Bragg (MA, Cambridge, 1885)
*************** William Lawrence Bragg (MA, Cambridge, 1912)
************ Alfred North Whitehead (MA, Cambridge, 1884)
************* Arthur Eddington (MA, Cambridge, 1905)
************** Hermann Bondi (MA, Cambridge, 1940)
Viennese physics
Jurij Vega
* Jurij Vega (he graduated from the Lyceum of Ljubljana (Liceju v Ljubljani) in 1775; he studied under Gabriel Gruber)
** (he studied under Jurij Vega)
**** Francesco Rossetti (Lehramtsprüfung, Vienna, 1857)
**** Josef Stefan (Dr. phil. hab., Vienna, 1858 under unknown adv.; post-doctoral studies under Andreas von Ettinghausen)
***** Ludwig Boltzmann (PhD, Vienna, 1866)
****** Paul Ehrenfest (PhD, Vienna, 1904)
******* George Uhlenbeck (PhD, Leiden, 1927)
******* Hendrik Casimir (PhD, Leiden, 1931)
**** Viktor von Lang (PhD, Giessen, 1859 under unknown adv.; he was appointed in 1865 to the chair of Andreas von Ettinghausen)
***** Franz S. Exner (Dr. phil. hab., Vienna, 1872)
****** Friedrich Hasenöhrl (PhD, Vienna, 1896, )
****** Marian Smoluchowski (PhD, Vienna, 1894)
****** Stefan Meyer (PhD, Vienna, 1886)
****** Felix Ehrenhaft (PhD, Vienna, 1903)
****** Lise Meitner (PhD, Vienna, 1905)
****** Karl Lark-Horovitz (PhD, Vienna, 1919)
**** Ernst Mach (PhD, Vienna, 1860)
***** Ottokar Tumlirz (PhD, Prague, 1879)
****** Arthur March (PhD, Innsbruck, 1913)
******* Fritz Sauter (PhD, Innsbruck, 1928)
******** Friedrich Bopp (PhD, Göttingen, 1937)
********* Rudolf Haag (PhD, Munich, 1951)
********** Huzihiro Araki (PhD, Princeton, 1960)
********** Bert Schroer (PhD, Hamburg, 1963)
********** Detlev Buchholz (PhD, Hamburg, 1972)
********** (PhD, Hamburg, 1974)
********** (PhD, Hamburg, 1976)
********* Klaus Samelson (PhD, Munich, 1951)
********* Friedrich L. Bauer (PhD, Munich, 1952)
******** Herbert Kroemer (PhD, Göttingen, 1952)

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