List: Recipients of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society

by likeorhate

•  Albert Einstein

  Albert Einstein (14 March 1879–18 April 1955) was a German-born Swiss-American theoretical physicist, philosopher and author who is widely regarded as one of the most influential and best known scientists and intellectuals of all time. He is often regarded as the father of modern physics. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

  

  45.3%
  

  20.0%
  

  34.7%
  
•  Arthur Stanley Eddington

  Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour. He is famous for his work regarding the Theory of Relativity. Eddington wrote a number of articles which announced and explained Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world.

  

  36.4%
  

  21.2%
  

  42.4%
  
•  Charles Babbage

  Charles Babbage, FRS (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans.

  

  31.6%
  

  36.8%
  

  31.6%
  
•  Edwin Hubble

  Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He profoundly changed our understanding of the universe by demonstrating the existence of other galaxies besides the Milky Way. He also discovered that the degree of redshift observed in light coming from a galaxy increased in proportion to the distance of that galaxy from the Milky Way. This became known as Hubble's law, and would help establish that the known universe is expanding.

  

  25.0%
  

  45.8%
  

  29.2%
  
•  Fred Hoyle

  Sir Fred Hoyle FRS (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer noted primarily for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stance on other cosmological and scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term originally coined by him as a jocular, perhaps disparaging, name for the theory which was the main rival to his own.

  

  15.4%
  

  38.5%
  

  46.2%
  
•  Friedrich Bessel

  Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (22 July 1784 – 17 March 1846) was a German mathematician, astronomer, and systematizer of the Bessel functions (which were discovered by Daniel Bernoulli). He was a contemporary of Carl Gauss, also a mathematician and astronomer. The asteroid 1552 Bessel was named in his honour.

  

  70.0%
  

  30.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  John Herschel

  Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS (March 7, 1792 – May 11, 1871) "Herschel | Sir | John Frederick William | 1792-1871 | astronomer" (biography), NAHSTE project, University of Edinburgh, NAHSTE-JHerschel. was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work. He was the son of astronomer Sir Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel and the father of 12 children.

  

  38.5%
  

  38.5%
  

  23.1%
  
•  Henri Poincaré

  Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and a philosopher of science. Poincaré is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics.

  

  40.0%
  

  24.0%
  

  36.0%
  
•  André-Louis Danjon

  André-Louis Danjon (6 April 1890 – 21 April 1967) was a French astronomer born in Caen. Danjon devised a method to measure "Earthshine" on the Moon using a telescope in which a prism split the Moon's image into two identical side-by-side images.

  

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  0.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  William McCrea (astronomer)

  Sir William Hunter McCrea (13 December 1904, Dublin – 25 April 1999) was an English astronomer and mathematician.

  

  100.0%
  

  0.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Ejnar Hertzsprung

  Ejnar Hertzsprung (8 October, 1873 - 21 October, 1967) was a Danish chemist and astronomer. Hertzsprung was born at Copenhagen. In the period 1911-1913, together with Henry Norris Russell, he developed the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. In 1913 he determined the distances to several Cepheid variable stars by statistical parallax, and was thus able to calibrate the relationship discovered by Henrietta Leavitt between Cepheid period and luminosity.

  

  0.0%
  

  100.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  William Henry Smyth

  William Henry Smyth (21 January 1788 – 8 September 1865) was an English sailor and astronomer. He was the father of Charles Piazzi Smyth, Sir Warington Wilkinson Smyth and General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. Of his daughters, Henrietta Grace Smyth married Professor Baden Powell and was mother of Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, while Georgiana Rosetta Smyth married Sir William Henry Flower. He was born in Westminster, London.

  

  18.2%
  

  27.3%
  

  54.5%
  
•  Albert Abraham Michelson

  Albert Abraham Michelson (December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.

  

  60.0%
  

  13.3%
  

  26.7%
  
•  Riccardo Giacconi

  Riccardo Giacconi (born October 6, 1931) is an Italian/American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid the foundations of X-ray astronomy.

  

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  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  Henry Norris Russell

  Henry Norris Russell (October 25, 1877 – February 18, 1957) was an American astronomer who, along with Ejnar Hertzsprung, developed the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (1910). In 1923, working with Frederick Saunders, he developed Russell–Saunders coupling which is also known as LS coupling.

  

  16.7%
  

  0.0%
  

  83.3%
  
•  Edward James Stone

  Edward James Stone (February 28, 1831–May 6, 1897) was an English astronomer. He was born in Notting Hill, London to Roger and Elizabeth Stone. Educated at the City of London School, he obtained a studentship at King's College London, and in 1856 a scholarship at Queens' College, Cambridge where he graduated as fifth wrangler in 1859, and was immediately elected fellow of his college. The following year he succeeded the Rev.

  

  22.2%
  

  44.4%
  

  33.3%
  
•  Francis Baily

  Francis Baily (28 April 1774 – 30 August 1844) was an British astronomer, most famous for his observations of 'Baily's beads' during an eclipse of the Sun.

  

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  66.7%
  

  33.3%
  
•  Giovanni Schiaparelli

  Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (March 14, 1835 – July 4, 1910) was an Italian astronomer and science historian. He studied at the University of Turin and Berlin Observatory. In 1859-1860 he worked in Pulkovo Observatory and then worked for over forty years at Brera Observatory. He was also a senator of the Kingdom of Italy, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino and the Regio Istituto Lombardo, and is particularly known for his studies of Mars.

  

  25.0%
  

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  75.0%
  
•  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS, /ˌtʃʌndrəˈʃeɪkɑr/ (October 19, 1910 – August 21, 1995) was an Indian American astrophysicist. He was a Nobel laureate in physics along with William Alfred Fowler for their work in the theoretical structure and evolution of stars. He was the nephew of Indian Nobel Laureate Sir C. V. Raman. Chandrasekhar served on the University of Chicago faculty from 1937 until his death in 1995 at the age of 84. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953.

  

  80.0%
  

  0.0%
  

  20.0%
  
•  Thomas Gold

  Thomas Gold (May 22, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in the 1950s proposed the now mostly abandoned 'steady state' hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed academic and scientific boundaries, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics.

  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Hannes Alfvén

  Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén (born 30 May 1908 in Norrköping, Sweden; died 2 April 1995 in Djursholm, Sweden) was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering.

  

  0.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  Urbain Le Verrier

  Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (11 March 1811 – 23 September 1877) was a French mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics and is best known for his part in the discovery of Neptune.

  

  0.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  John Couch Adams

  John Couch Adams (5 June 1819 – 21 January 1892) was a British mathematician and astronomer. Adams was born in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall and died in Cambridge. The Cornish name Couch is pronounced "cooch". His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton.

  

  66.7%
  

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  33.3%
  
•  Jacobus Kapteyn

  Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn, (January 19, 1851–June 18, 1922) was a Dutch astronomer, best known for his extensive studies of the Milky Way and as the first discoverer of evidence for galactic rotation. Kapteyn was born in Barneveld, and went to the University of Utrecht to study mathematics and physics in 1868.

  

  50.0%
  

  25.0%
  

  25.0%
  
•  Asaph Hall

  Asaph Hall III (October 15, 1829 – November 22, 1907) was an American astronomer who is most famous for having discovered the moons of Mars in 1877. He determined the orbits of satellites of other planets and of double stars, the rotation of Saturn, and the mass of Mars.

  

  28.6%
  

  42.9%
  

  28.6%