It's a
physicist! No, it's a
mathematician!
Actually, it's a
mathematical physicist.
As I see it, mathematical physics has two main
areas of
focus. The
first is to find new
applications of
mathematics to
physics. The
mathematical methods employed in this
quest tend to be slightly too
esoteric to be part of the
average physicist's knowledge base. One
example of such a
breakthrough is
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which utilised
differential geometry at a
time when
hardly any
physicists received
training in what
seemed to be such a
useless topic.
The
second branch of mathematical physics is
concerned with finding more mathematically
rigorous frameworks for existing
physical theories. It is
interesting to note that
several major branches of
mathematical study have been
inspired by a cobbled-together physical
theory. One of the foremost examples of this is
functional analysis, which finds much of its
historical motivation in
quantum mechanics.
It is
difficult to
classify scientists who lived less-
recently as mathematical physicists since such
fine distinctions were not
drawn until the
latter half of the
twentieth century, but I would
include the
following as mathematical physicists:
Albert Einstein,
Emmy Noether,
Paul Dirac,
Adrien-Marie Legendre,
George Gabriel Stokes,
Isaac Newton,
Lev Davidovich Landau,
Julian Schwinger and
Jean Fourier.