This is a list of

physical Physical may refer to: * Physical examination, a regular overall check-up with a doctor * ''Physical'' (Olivia Newton-John album), 1981 ** "Physical" (Olivia Newton-John song) * ''Physical'' (Gabe Gurnsey album) * "Physical" (Alcazar song) (2004) * ...

and

mathematical constant A mathematical constant is a key number whose value is fixed by an unambiguous definition, often referred to by a symbol (e.g., an alphabet letter), or by mathematicians' names to facilitate using it across multiple mathematical problems. Cons ...

s named after people.

Eponym An eponym is a person, a place, or a thing after whom or which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named. The adjectives which are derived from the word eponym include ''eponymous'' and ''eponymic''. Usage of the word The term ''epon ...

ous constants and their influence on scientific citations have been discussed in the literature.''Non-indexed Eponymal Citedness (NIEC): First Fact-finding Examination of a Phenomenon of Scientific Literature''
Endre Száva-Kováts. "Journal of Information Science;" (1994); 20:55 *

Apéry's constant In mathematics, Apéry's constant is the sum of the reciprocals of the positive cubes. That is, it is defined as the number : \begin \zeta(3) &= \sum_^\infty \frac \\ &= \lim_ \left(\frac + \frac + \cdots + \frac\right), \end ...

–

Roger Apéry Roger Apéry (; 14 November 1916, Rouen – 18 December 1994, Caen) was a French mathematician most remembered for Apéry's theorem, which states that is an irrational number. Here, denotes the Riemann zeta function. Biography Apéry was born ...

* Archimedes' constant (, pi) –

Archimedes Archimedes of Syracuse (;; ) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientis ...

Avogadro constant The Avogadro constant, commonly denoted or , is the proportionality factor that relates the number of constituent particles (usually molecules, atoms or ions) in a sample with the amount of substance in that sample. It is an SI defining ...

–

Amedeo Avogadro Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro, Count of Quaregna and Cerreto (, also , ; 9 August 17769 July 1856) was an Italian scientist, most noted for his contribution to molecular theory now known as Avogadro's law, which states that equal volume ...

* Balmer's constant –

Johann Jakob Balmer Johann Jakob Balmer (1 May 1825 – 12 March 1898) was a Swiss mathematician best known for his work in physics, the Balmer series of hydrogen atom. Biography Balmer was born in Lausen, Switzerland, the son of a chief justice also named Johann ...

* Belphegor's prime –

Belphegor In Christian demonology, Belphegor (or Beelphegor, he, בַּעַל-פְּעוֹר ''Báʿal-pəʿór'' - Lord of the Gap) is a demon. In later Kabbalah Belphegor is a demon who helps people make discoveries. He seduces people by suggesting to ...

(demon) *

Bohr magneton In atomic physics, the Bohr magneton (symbol ) is a physical constant and the natural unit for expressing the magnetic moment of an electron caused by its orbital or spin angular momentum. The Bohr magneton, in SI units is defined as \mu_\m ...

–

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 ...

Bohr radius The Bohr radius (''a''0) is a physical constant, approximately equal to the most probable distance between the nucleus and the electron in a hydrogen atom in its ground state. It is named after Niels Bohr, due to its role in the Bohr model of an ...

–

Boltzmann constant The Boltzmann constant ( or ) is the proportionality factor that relates the average relative kinetic energy of particles in a gas with the thermodynamic temperature of the gas. It occurs in the definitions of the kelvin and the gas constan ...

–

Ludwig Boltzmann Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (; 20 February 1844 – 5 September 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievements were the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of ther ...

* Brun's constant –

Viggo Brun Viggo Brun (13 October 1885 – 15 August 1978) was a Norwegian professor, mathematician and number theorist. Contributions In 1915, he introduced a new method, based on Legendre's version of the sieve of Eratosthenes, now known as the ' ...

* Cabibbo angle –

Nicola Cabibbo Nicola Cabibbo (10 April 1935 – 16 August 2010) was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on the weak interaction. Life Cabibbo, son of a Sicilian lawyer, was born in Rome. He graduated in theoretical physics at the Università di Rom ...

Chaitin's constant In the computer science subfield of algorithmic information theory, a Chaitin constant (Chaitin omega number) or halting probability is a real number that, informally speaking, represents the probability that a randomly constructed program will ...

–

Gregory Chaitin Gregory John Chaitin ( ; born 25 June 1947) is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a computer-t ...

Champernowne constant In mathematics, the Champernowne constant is a transcendental real constant whose decimal expansion has important properties. It is named after economist and mathematician D. G. Champernowne, who published it as an undergraduate in 1933. For ...

–

D. G. Champernowne thumbail, right David Gawen Champernowne, (9 July 1912 – 19 August 2000) was an English economist and mathematician. Champernowne was the only child of Francis Gawayne Champernowne (1866–1921), M.A. (Oxon.), a barrister and bursar of Kebl ...

Chandrasekhar limit The Chandrasekhar limit () is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star. The currently accepted value of the Chandrasekhar limit is about (). White dwarfs resist gravitational collapse primarily through electron degeneracy pressure, compar ...

–

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (; ) (19 October 1910 – 21 August 1995) was an Indian-American theoretical physicist who spent his professional life in the United States. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for " ...

Copeland–Erdős constant The Copeland–Erdős constant is the concatenation of "0." with the base 10 representations of the prime numbers in order. Its value, using the modern definition of prime, is approximately :0.235711131719232931374143… . The constant is irration ...

–

Paul Erdős Paul Erdős ( hu, Erdős Pál ; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in ...

and

Peter Borwein Peter Benjamin Borwein (born St. Andrews, Scotland, May 10, 1953 – 23 August 2020) was a Canadian mathematician and a professor at Simon Fraser University. He is known as a co-author of the paper which presented the Bailey–Borwein–P ...

Coulomb constant The Coulomb constant, the electric force constant, or the electrostatic constant (denoted , or ) is a proportionality constant in electrostatics equations. In SI base units it is equal to .Derived from ''k''e = 1/(4''πε''0) – It was named ...

(electric force constant, electrostatic constant, ) –

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (; ; 14 June 1736 – 23 August 1806) was a French officer, engineer, and physicist. He is best known as the eponymous discoverer of what is now called Coulomb's law, the description of the electrostatic force of attra ...

* Eddington number –

Arthur Stanley Eddington Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the lumi ...

Dunbar's number Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This ...

–

Robin Dunbar Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947) is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour. He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department ...

* Embree–Trefethen constant * Erdős–Borwein constant *

Euler–Mascheroni constant Euler's constant (sometimes also called the Euler–Mascheroni constant) is a mathematical constant usually denoted by the lowercase Greek letter gamma (). It is defined as the limiting difference between the harmonic series and the natural l ...

(

\gamma

) –

Leonhard Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries ...

and

Lorenzo Mascheroni Lorenzo Mascheroni (; May 13, 1750 – July 14, 1800) was an Italian mathematician. Biography He was born near Bergamo, Lombardy. At first mainly interested in the humanities (poetry and Greek language), he eventually became professor of mathem ...

Euler's number The number , also known as Euler's number, is a mathematical constant approximately equal to 2.71828 that can be characterized in many ways. It is the base of the natural logarithms. It is the limit of as approaches infinity, an expressi ...

(

e

) –

Faraday constant In physical chemistry, the Faraday constant, denoted by the symbol and sometimes stylized as ℱ, is the electric charge per mole of elementary charges. It is named after the English scientist Michael Faraday. Since the 2019 redefinition of ...

–

Michael Faraday Michael Faraday (; 22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic inducti ...

Feigenbaum constants In mathematics, specifically bifurcation theory, the Feigenbaum constants are two mathematical constants which both express ratios in a bifurcation diagram for a non-linear map. They are named after the physicist Mitchell J. Feigenbaum. Histo ...

–

Mitchell Feigenbaum Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum (December 19, 1944 – June 30, 2019) was an American mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants. Early life Feigenbaum was born in Philadelphia, Pe ...

Fermi coupling constant In particle physics, Fermi's interaction (also the Fermi theory of beta decay or the Fermi four-fermion interaction) is an explanation of the beta decay, proposed by Enrico Fermi in 1933. The theory posits four fermions directly interacting ...

–

Enrico Fermi Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" an ...

* Gauss's constant –

Carl Friedrich Gauss Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; german: Gauß ; la, Carolus Fridericus Gauss; 30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes refer ...

Graham's number Graham's number is an immense number that arose as an upper bound on the answer of a problem in the mathematical field of Ramsey theory. It is much larger than many other large numbers such as Skewes's number and Moser's number, both of which ...

–

Ronald Graham Ronald Lewis Graham (October 31, 1935July 6, 2020) was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He ...

* Hartree energy –

Douglas Hartree Douglas Rayner Hartree (27 March 1897 – 12 February 1958) was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the c ...

Hubble constant Hubble's law, also known as the Hubble–Lemaître law, is the observation in physical cosmology that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. In other words, the farther they are, the faster they are moving ...

–

Edwin Hubble Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. Hubble proved that many objects previousl ...

Josephson constant The magnetic flux, represented by the symbol , threading some contour or loop is defined as the magnetic field multiplied by the loop area , i.e. . Both and can be arbitrary, meaning can be as well. However, if one deals with the superconducti ...

–

Brian David Josephson Brian David Josephson (born 4 January 1940) is a Welsh theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge. Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nob ...

Kaprekar's constant In number theory, Kaprekar's routine is an iterative algorithm that, with each iteration, takes a natural number in a given number base, creates two new numbers by sorting the digits of its number by descending and ascending order, and subtracts th ...

–

D. R. Kaprekar Dattatreya Ramchandra Kaprekar ( mr, दत्तात्रेय रामचंद्र कापरेकर; 17 January 1905 – 1986) was an Indian recreational mathematician who described several classes of natural numbers incl ...

Kerr constant The Kerr effect, also called the quadratic electro-optic (QEO) effect, is a change in the refractive index of a material in response to an applied electric field. The Kerr effect is distinct from the Pockels effect in that the induced index chang ...

– John Kerr *

Khinchin's constant In number theory, Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin proved that for almost all real numbers ''x'', coefficients ''a'i'' of the continued fraction expansion of ''x'' have a finite geometric mean that is independent of the value of ''x'' and is know ...

– Aleksandr Khinchin *

Landau–Ramanujan constant In mathematics and the field of number theory, the Landau–Ramanujan constant is the positive real number ''b'' that occurs in a theorem proved by Edmund Landau in 1908, stating that for large x, the number of positive integers below x that are ...

–

Edmund Landau Edmund Georg Hermann Landau (14 February 1877 – 19 February 1938) was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. Biography Edmund Landau was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father was Leopol ...

and

Srinivasa Ramanujan Srinivasa Ramanujan (; born Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar, ; 22 December 188726 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, ...

* Legendre's constant (one, 1) –

Adrien-Marie Legendre Adrien-Marie Legendre (; ; 18 September 1752 – 9 January 1833) was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are name ...

Loschmidt constant The ''Loschmidt constant'' or Loschmidt's number (symbol: ''n''0) is the number of particles (atoms or molecules) of an ideal gas in a given volume (the number density), and usually quoted at standard temperature and pressure. The 2014 CODATA recom ...

–

Johann Josef Loschmidt Johann Josef Loschmidt (15 March 1821 – 8 July 1895), who referred to himself mostly as Josef Loschmidt (omitting his first name), was a notable Austrian scientist who performed ground-breaking work in chemistry, physics (thermodynamics, optics, ...

* Ludolphsche Zahl –

Ludolph van Ceulen Ludolph van Ceulen (, ; 28 January 1540 – 31 December 1610) was a German-Dutch mathematician from Hildesheim. He emigrated to the Netherlands. Biography Van Ceulen moved to Delft most likely in 1576 to teach fencing and mathematics and in 159 ...

* Mean of Phidias (golden ratio,

\phi

, phi) – Phidias *

Meissel–Mertens constant The Meissel–Mertens constant (named after Ernst Meissel and Franz Mertens), also referred to as Mertens constant, Kronecker's constant, Hadamard– de la Vallée-Poussin constant or the prime reciprocal constant, is a mathematical constant in n ...

* Moser's number *

Newtonian constant of gravitation The gravitational constant (also known as the universal gravitational constant, the Newtonian constant of gravitation, or the Cavendish gravitational constant), denoted by the capital letter , is an empirical physical constant involved in th ...

(gravitational constant,

G

) –

Sir Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author (described in his time as a " natural philosopher"), widely recognised as one of the g ...

Planck constant The Planck constant, or Planck's constant, is a fundamental physical constant of foundational importance in quantum mechanics. The constant gives the relationship between the energy of a photon and its frequency, and by the mass-energy equivale ...

(

h

) –

Max Planck Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (, ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical p ...

:* Reduced Planck constant or Dirac constant (

h

-bar, ) –

Paul Dirac Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the Univer ...

* Ramanujan–Soldner constant –

and Johann Georg von Soldner * Richardson constant –

Owen Willans Richardson Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS (26 April 1879 – 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's law. Biography Richardson was born in Dew ...

* Rayo's number – Agustin Rayo *

Rydberg constant In spectroscopy, the Rydberg constant, symbol R_\infty for heavy atoms or R_\text for hydrogen, named after the Swedish physicist Johannes Rydberg, is a physical constant relating to the electromagnetic spectra of an atom. The constant first aro ...

–

Johannes Rydberg Johannes (Janne) Robert Rydberg (; 8 November 1854 – 28 December 1919) was a Swedish physicist mainly known for devising the Rydberg formula, in 1888, which is used to describe the wavelengths of photons (of visible light and other electro ...

* Sommerfeld constant –

Arnold Sommerfeld Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, (; 5 December 1868 – 26 April 1951) was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and mentored many students for the new era of theoretic ...

* Sackur–Tetrode constant –

Otto Sackur Otto Sackur (28 September 1880 in Breslau, Germany – 17 December 1914 in Berlin, Germany) was a German physical chemist. He is known for the development of the Sackur–Tetrode equation, which he developed independently of Hugo Tetrode. ...

and

Hugo Tetrode Hugo Martin Tetrode (7 March 1895, in Amsterdam – 18 January 1931, in Amstelveen) was a Dutch theoretical physicist who contributed to statistical physics, early quantum theory and quantum mechanics. In 1912, Tetrode developed the Sackur� ...

* Sierpiński's constant –

Wacław Sierpiński Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński (; 14 March 1882 – 21 October 1969) was a Polish mathematician. He was known for contributions to set theory (research on the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis), number theory, theory of functions, and to ...

Skewes' number In number theory, Skewes's number is any of several large numbers used by the South African mathematician Stanley Skewes as upper bounds for the smallest natural number x for which :\pi(x) > \operatorname(x), where is the prime-counting function ...

– Stanley Skewes *

Stefan–Boltzmann constant The Stefan–Boltzmann constant (also Stefan's constant), a physical constant denoted by the Greek letter ''σ'' (sigma), is the constant of proportionality in the Stefan–Boltzmann law: "the total intensity radiated over all wavelengths inc ...

–

Jožef Stefan Josef Stefan ( sl, Jožef Štefan; 24 March 1835 – 7 January 1893) was an ethnic Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire. Life and work Stefan was born in an outskirt village of St. Peter (Slovene: ; to ...

and

* Theodorus' constant ( ≅ ±1.732050807568877...) –

Theodorus of Cyrene Theodorus of Cyrene ( el, Θεόδωρος ὁ Κυρηναῖος) was an ancient Greek mathematician who lived during the 5th century BC. The only first-hand accounts of him that survive are in three of Plato's dialogues: the ''Theaetetus'', th ...

* Tupper's number – Jeff Tupper * Viswanath's constant – Divakar Viswanath *

von Klitzing constant The quantum Hall effect (or integer quantum Hall effect) is a quantized version of the Hall effect which is observed in two-dimensional electron systems subjected to low temperatures and strong magnetic fields, in which the Hall resistance exhi ...

–

Klaus von Klitzing Klaus von Klitzing (, born 28 June 1943, Schroda) is a German physicist, known for discovery of the integer quantum Hall effect, for which he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics. Education In 1962, Klitzing passed the Abitur at the A ...

* Wien displacement law constant –

Wilhelm Wien Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (; 13 January 1864 – 30 August 1928) was a German physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbod ...

Notes and references

{{reflist

Constants Constant or The Constant may refer to: Mathematics * Constant (mathematics), a non-varying value * Mathematical constant, a special number that arises naturally in mathematics, such as or Other concepts * Control variable or scientific const ...

* * Constants named after people

See also

Notes and references