Rainer Weiss
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Rainer Weiss was an American physicist who made fundamental contributions to the detection of gravitational waves, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for this work. His research helped confirm one of Albert Einstein's major predictions and opened up a new way for scientists to observe the universe.
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5 total works indexed
- Differential Evolution – A Simple and Efficient Heuristic for global Optimization over Continuous Spaces
· 1997 · cited 24,185x
- Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,320x
- Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
· 2016 · cited 11,419x
- Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017
Article
Rainer Weiss (/waɪs/ WYSSE, German: [vaɪs]; September 29, 1932 – August 25, 2025) was a German-American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
In 2017, Weiss was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".
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1932 births2025 deaths21st-century American physicistsAmerican Nobel laureatesAmerican people of German-Jewish descentColumbia Grammar & Preparatory School alumniEmigrants from Nazi GermanyExperimental physicistsFellows of the American Astronomical SocietyFellows of the American Physical SocietyGerman emigrants to CzechoslovakiaGerman emigrants to the United States